Are you referring to the S3 API? I believe the S3 API is explicitly licensed under Apache.
Disclaimer: I was previously employed by Amazon and currently Google. Opinions are my own, I'm not a lawyer, etc.
Disclaimer: I was previously employed by Amazon and currently Google. Opinions are my own, I'm not a lawyer, etc.
Some of the argument was over whether the Apache licence inherited by Google from Harmony was valid, or whether Harmony itself was in breach of copyright (and therefore had no valid licence Google could use).
Once the courts decided APIs are copyrightable the argument switched to whether Google's was Fair-Use, with a jury saying it was, federal appeals court saying no, and thus it ended up at the Supreme court.
Here's a Groklaw [0] copy of an early (April 2012) Oracle argument asking for Jury instructions around the licence topic that explains it well:
"As made clear by Apache itself, Apache never had a license from Sun or Oracle for Harmony. Apache had no rights to Java technology that it could give to Google"
My understanding is that all of the APIs in question are shared between the (now-Oracle) JVM and the OpenJDK implementation. (Indeed, I think the actual implementation of the Java code in question is the same between the closed and open source versions, it's only the JVM itself that differs.)