Juries were concocted to make judgments on fundamental moral issues. That's why "12 random strangers" works -- the law is supposed to reflect the common moral standpoint of the society, so selecting any twelve adults of sound mind from the community generally gives you that.

Where deep technical knowledge is required to understand the implications of a verdict, I think that the "community" should be defined as the community whose domain is primarily effected (in this case, computer scientists/software engineers). This doesn't sound too horrible to me.

Perhaps the fact that we need specialized juries should be a signal that our law is too specialized. Most things that should be illegal can be described rather succinctly when it gets down to it, and I think "no way twelve random people could comprehend" could be useful bright barrier line for "Maybe we're losing a little bit of control here..."

This is still a simple moral dilemma. Did ones work was copied or not?

it's less complex than economy when someone have to be judged for debt. it's less complex than forensic medicine when one have to be judged for murder.

stop acting like it's a secret circle only you were able to enter.

the million dollar legal teams will bring in experts, those experts will explain what's their expert opinion on the fact. the 12 average joes will decide, and life will go on. If you think million dollar teams can just pay experts to say anything, the other team's expert will point that out to that other team and other legal mechanism will punish the one lying.

now, if it were Google vs John Doe, then i'd be sorry for poor john.

I agree that basic copyright claims can be reasonably decided by a random jury. Questions like "was this book copied unfairly?" are totally within bounds because everyone is familiar with the objects and context in play. But I think it's a stretch to expect any twelve people pulled off the street to be able to comprehend the concept of "an API" and the other technical things swirling around this case. Maybe this jury was pretty smart, but I know no matter how many times this concept is explained to my grandma, for example, she will not really understand what you were talking about.

I think the fact that you have two opposing teams of "experts" makes it even more difficult for the jury; Oracle surely brings people in that talk about APIs in more concrete terms so that they can strengthen their copyright claim, and Google surely brings in people that say, "No, an API is just a set of concepts that trigger magic in some other code", and I think that normal people would just be more confused after hearing this.

Wouldn't it be better to simply recognize this is a case that requires deep technical knowledge, find software people who do not have a bias one way or the other toward Google/Oracle, and put them on the jury, where they will understand the extreme consequences of ruling that APIs represent copyright infringement, instead of just sitting twelve random people in front of two or three short videos and expecting them to grasp that the outcome of the case here will effect and set precedent as to whether clean-room implementations anywhere are legitimate, and what that means? If this precedent was set way back when it may even have been construed to apply to implementations of protocols like HTTP; imagine the consequences if some early player like Urbana-Champaign was given the copyright to the "HTTP API" and no one except them was allowed to write a browser that used HTTP (without licensure). Also, I hope no one here depends on WINE.

Do we really expect any set of twelve random people to understand this is the kind of decision to which they are contributing?

That would create a ruling elite. Thank dog it's not like that.

The jury doesn't really understand the subtleties of the law either. They're given a lot of hand-holding, and asked pointed questions about what they determine to be factually true. The judge explains to them the legal implications for their factual findings.