Thought experiment: What if it an extremely intelligent person memorised every Metallica song on a free Spotify account, down to every small detail. Later that person writes a new song, it's heavily inspired by Metallica, it sounds like them, you might even mistake it for them except for the vocals, but the lyrics are new, the chords are new, etc. Did that person then violate copyright, even though it's a completely new song?

I know the AI techbros are just scraping every datapoint they can get their grubby little hands on, but it makes me think.

Imagine for a sec that all that AI buzz and hype leads to something that is indistinguishable from that extremely intelligent person (however unlikely).

We're not anywhere close to a scenario like that, but at what point is a regular artist that spent their youth listening to Britney Spears violating copyright law, philosophically speaking, when they decide they want to make music like that?

Penny for your thoughts.