At the risk of sounding like a copyright newbie, shouldn't that be covered by just doing a 'clean room' implementation? As long as you can verifiably prove that

At the risk of sounding like a copyright newbie, shouldn't that be covered by just doing a 'clean room' implementation? As long as you can verifiably prove that you didn't copy the source, it should fall under general use (as there's really only one way of doing such a thing), right? Much like Apple can't patent rectangles, although they tried.