My vague recollection of this case is that Oracle was kind of up a creek with the "java.lang.Math.max" argument, because max() itself is such a well-understood mathematical function and has been defined in numerous programming languages before Java. This put some constraints on Oracle, and thus "the name is the copyrightable contribution" became their (weak) argument. This does not necessarily mean that changing the function name (as opposed to calling interface and interface organization) would have been sufficient to avoid copyright infringement in every case (in Oracle's opinion.)