Again, you are thinking patents or trademarks. My house may look the same, but it's been built by different people, different electricians, on different land.

Again, you are thinking patents or trademarks. My house may look the same, but it's been built by different people, different electricians, on different land. It probably has a different internal structure, different materials, and slightly different external marks, because it was rebuilt from the ground up. Copyright would apply if I used the exact same blueprints, but if I hired an architect to make blueprints with the same external design as another house that would be similar to clean room design and not a violation of copyright. Like how Google can make a copy of the Java API (they only got hit for having the same implementation written by the guy who wrote the version oracle had copyrighten in the first place). In the analogy it would be theft if I took your house, put it on my land, and claimed it was mine. And that's what it is to commit criminal copyright violation (e.g. you distribute copies for profit, claiming you own it). Yes in the digital world copies don't deprive the other of anything tangible, but like stealing a house, it does deprive them of the work that was invested to build that expression in the first place.