Patents can be (and often are) invalidated during a court case, and determining if a patent has been infringed upon isn't always black and white.

Breach of copyright claims on the other hand are usually much harder to dismiss if the copied works are easy to identify (which is often the case with source code and documentation).

IANAL however, but it should be interesting to hear more about the details as the case continues.

I'm not really in favour of software patents so would be quite happy to see Oracle lose that part of this case, but on the other hand duplicating the work of another is simply not on in which case if the copyright claims are proven then Google should pay suitable damages.

Either way though this case means absolutely nothing to anyone other than Google and Oracle right now - the case has no bearing on Java whatsoever (other than to focus minds on getting a licence if you want to do business with Oracle...)