Copyright and patents are entirely 2 different issues.
This trial is very important because Oracle is suing for both and because copyright protection is much, much stronger than patents.
The differences: patents expire in 20 years, copyright is basically unlimited; patent infringement is hard to prove, copyright infringement is easy; patents are easily invalidated, while copyright is pretty clear (except in this case); getting a patent is expensive, while copyrighting something is essentially free, etc...
And copyright protection of interfaces to block interoperability has been struck down so many times it's explicitly written into the EU convention (article 4 IIRC)
Oracle could conceivably get a ruling on the 'Java' name but using copyright to block somebody else doing an interoperable implementation has been defeated before
I'm sure Oracle knows this and is simply going to trial in the hope of a random verdict (it happens) or to get Google to reveal lots of documents that can be used in a future patent / monopoly / trade case
The war is over whether you can subsequently block these with patents on the concepts underlying the API