And all smart websites should include a ToS that says you are not allowed to access their data, so they can sue for trespassing anyone that they don't like selectively.
The far reaching of government into this, and also the pirating stuff (which I do not condone but think that arresting people for that is waay too much) is what makes me want for the system to collapse under it's own weight. Like some website suing members of congress for visiting it while violating the ToS in this case.
I also secretly wanted Oracle to win vs Google so that cloning an API was piracy and that would extend to being a crime to purchase pirated goods which would make all clean room reverse engineering a criminal activity. That would lead to anyone that uses a PC without an authentic IBM BIOS (look up Phoenix BIOS) to be arrested, in theory, so even the US president would have to fall into that. It would have been a glorious shitstorm if Oracle won and IBM took that precedent to it's logical implications, the computer world would have failed, and the law would either be made even more arbitrary or be fixed, but at least it would be shown how idiotic the state of affairs was.
Your idea about Oracle winning and society coming crashing to a halt is ridiculous and wouldn't have happened. Your flaw is believing that the law and the government will work with logical precision, so that a flaw in the law will, like an infinite recursive loop in programming code, cause complete disaster. It doesn't work that way. There's plenty of cases where the law is clearly broken (see civil forfeiture vs. the 4th Amendment to the US Constitution), yet nothing is done. That's because the government is run by humans, and they'll enforce things the way they want. Double standards happen all the time with law, and it takes big, expensive court cases to sort them out, and of course that only happens when some moneyed interest wants to fix it (which is why civil forfeiture is still a big thing--they're not going after extremely wealthy people or corporations with it). While IBM is certainly large enough to bring a big case like you suggested, the US government is far bigger and can simply invent a legal way of ignoring them, just as was done when the SCOTUS decided to rule in favor of using Eminent Domain to seize private property to hand over to commercial interests.
