After hearing the rest of the Coder Radio discussion, I have these additional comments:
1. Again regarding the email, I think it bears to be very clear on this: the fact that some engineers or executives thought that it is a good idea to get a license, or even required to get a license, does not mean that it is *actually* required to get a license – and the court definitely agreed.
Compare for example, a “pay as much as you want” sale (there is stuff like this, also with real world products), and you thought “Hmm.. maybe I’ll pay them some money”, but then decided not to – even if you sent your original thought in an email to the entire world, that by itself does not make you a criminal if you eventually decided *not* to pay for something was offered for free.
2. IPs copyrightable, licensed, or not – they keep going back to it, and I’ll keep asserting that it doesn’t matter: reverse engineering APIs is a time honored practice, and it is usually left to the court to decide if its OK or not on a per-implementation basis, where the court sometimes favors the original owner and sometimes the reimplementation. In the US the consensus is that it is fair use to reverse engineer APIs, except if an EULA forbids it – which isn’t the case here, so it should be allowed. Hey, and what do you know – the court agrees.