> but my understanding of copyright is that if a person when into a clean room and wrote an new article from scratch, without having read any NYT, that just so happened to be exactly the same as an existing NYT article, it would still be a copyright violation.
It would not be. Independent creation is a complete defense against copyright infringement.
It would not be. Independent creation is a complete defense against copyright infringement.
Patents, however, do work this way.