Of course this is the case. If laws are so poorly defined, it’s not even possible in principium for the courts to act in good faith. Furthermore, since for the most part lawyers have no mathematical training whatsoever, I seriously doubt that it would even be possible for them to interpret laws that were well-defined.
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I am a GPL developer. For my package a lot of the time I look at other GPL packages that have the same functionality in other languages like R, MATLAB or Stata as many of the implementations are published in academic journals with the implementations under GPL license. Still, I find it far more useful to just look at the mathematical algorithm and only consult the source code in extreme cases to check certain issues or flavor (architecture of the structs and organization of methods). Still the code I program in Julia is very different due to language details, functionality, design of package, personal style, etc. Even if I were to have decided to got MIT license, the the usefulness of previous implementations lies in the documentation much more than the source code at least in my field.
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AFAIK the GPL fared pretty well in courts, which would seem to indicate that courts are not as clueless about software licenses as you suggest.
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