I imagine the illustrator did the art work-for-hire and the automaker holds the copyright on the illustration and manual.

But I see your point as to conflating implementation with the documentation.

And us folks who've used java for awhile knows that documentation is automatically generated with the javadocs utility. We just have to write the descriptions. (Looks at feet. Shuffles a bit.)

Does the api rise to the level of a manual, in terms of protected expression in a tangible medium? Did Sun effectively reserve any rights?

I come back to this, while Google did the work to implement, they used Sun's blueprint in order to have a competitive advantage in the smartphone market: if developers had to learn a new language, they might pass on paying the costs to bring their products to the platform. So Google paid some dues. Did they pay all they needed to?

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