I agree that basic copyright claims can be reasonably decided by a random jury. Questions like "was this book copied unfairly?" are totally within bounds because everyone is familiar with the objects and context in play. But I think it's a stretch to expect any twelve people pulled off the street to be able to comprehend the concept of "an API" and the other technical things swirling around this case. Maybe this jury was pretty smart, but I know no matter how many times this concept is explained to my grandma, for example, she will not really understand what you were talking about.
I think the fact that you have two opposing teams of "experts" makes it even more difficult for the jury; Oracle surely brings people in that talk about APIs in more concrete terms so that they can strengthen their copyright claim, and Google surely brings in people that say, "No, an API is just a set of concepts that trigger magic in some other code", and I think that normal people would just be more confused after hearing this.
Wouldn't it be better to simply recognize this is a case that requires deep technical knowledge, find software people who do not have a bias one way or the other toward Google/Oracle, and put them on the jury, where they will understand the extreme consequences of ruling that APIs represent copyright infringement, instead of just sitting twelve random people in front of two or three short videos and expecting them to grasp that the outcome of the case here will effect and set precedent as to whether clean-room implementations anywhere are legitimate, and what that means? If this precedent was set way back when it may even have been construed to apply to implementations of protocols like HTTP; imagine the consequences if some early player like Urbana-Champaign was given the copyright to the "HTTP API" and no one except them was allowed to write a browser that used HTTP (without licensure). Also, I hope no one here depends on WINE.
Do we really expect any set of twelve random people to understand this is the kind of decision to which they are contributing?
I think the fact that you have two opposing teams of "experts" makes it even more difficult for the jury; Oracle surely brings people in that talk about APIs in more concrete terms so that they can strengthen their copyright claim, and Google surely brings in people that say, "No, an API is just a set of concepts that trigger magic in some other code", and I think that normal people would just be more confused after hearing this.
Wouldn't it be better to simply recognize this is a case that requires deep technical knowledge, find software people who do not have a bias one way or the other toward Google/Oracle, and put them on the jury, where they will understand the extreme consequences of ruling that APIs represent copyright infringement, instead of just sitting twelve random people in front of two or three short videos and expecting them to grasp that the outcome of the case here will effect and set precedent as to whether clean-room implementations anywhere are legitimate, and what that means? If this precedent was set way back when it may even have been construed to apply to implementations of protocols like HTTP; imagine the consequences if some early player like Urbana-Champaign was given the copyright to the "HTTP API" and no one except them was allowed to write a browser that used HTTP (without licensure). Also, I hope no one here depends on WINE.
Do we really expect any set of twelve random people to understand this is the kind of decision to which they are contributing?