Scala protected methods aren't that much protected

Just discovered weird behavior of Scala's protected methods: they're actually compiled to public methods in byte-code. Therefore if you try to override them in Java code with another protected method compilation will fail with something like this: "attempting to assign weaker access privileges; was public". After some googling I've discovered that other people also spotted this issue. I think such weird compiler behavior was needed because of access level mismatch in Scala and Java - but I thought that Scala's protected is more restrictive then Java's. So I'm yet to figure out reason of such behavior. By the way, package-level protected (like protected[yourpackage]) is also compiled to public - at least for Scala 2.10.0