In a 2014 Electronic Frontier Foundation press release in light of the decisions by the Federal Circuit Courts, they noted that excluding APIs from copyright protection helped bolster development of modern digital infrastructure, including the Internet, by way of allowing existing APIs to be reimplemented or extended. In addition, they implied that allowing APIs to be copyrighted could potentially be considered an anti-competitive practice.

The article also includes Judge William Alsup's ruling from 2012, who said that Java APIs are not copyrightable and that Oracle would have been allowed to "tie up" a set of utilitarian methods that many Java programmers rely on. To clarify, these methods perform actions that are considered "generic" and standardized by many different APIs for many different programming languages in the computing world, as opposed to methods that perform actions specifically related to Sun's or Oracle's ecosystem.

Rather than setting a new precedent, the Supreme Court ruling solidified the consensus which has been held by computer scientists and other workers in the tech industry for decades: that APIs are not entitled to copyright protection, and by this rule, developers as well as companies would be allowed to build on others' work and advance the field of computing. This included the possibility of promoting competition in the tech industry, which is often regarded as a key to innovation. Extending copyright protection to APIs has been said in the software industry to end up stifling innovation in addition to promoting a sense of leniency with anti-competitive practices.