You said Using this judge’s logic, a person should be able to go to college and download all their papers, project assignments, and homework submissions from a copyrighted source, turn them in and get full credit for them.
To make your example actually work according to the scale used here, we would have to make some changes to your parameters.
If you have 2 students who sit at opposite ends of the class room each writing a 2 page essay as part of an exam and each used an exact copy of the same sentence at some point in the essay.
Then the instructor decided that it was "similar but reasonable", and passed both students.
That's a comparison using students/papers/cheating in a scale that matches the case here.
Google downloaded java class files from Sun/Oracle, then they decompiled the files in order to get hold of the original source. Then they knowingly stole the source code and copied it. Next they compiled it and knowingly released it as their own while it was unlicensed.
That’s what happened. But this is probably minor in the grand scheme of things compared to the other things that Google does. For instance they knowingly promote pornography through their images.google.com image search, and they present that pornography to innocent children.
It was no accident that Google showed a huge disregard for professional ethics in dealing with the Oracle/Java licensing issue. The fact is we all know that Google shows a lack of ethics and common decency ever single day.