Copyright should only apply to the code body that was written - re-writing the same functionality from scratch should be fine but it might be wise to take extre

Copyright should only apply to the code body that was written - re-writing the same functionality from scratch should be fine but it might be wise to take extreme care to ensure that none of the original code gets included by mistake or that any similarities are anything more than superficial. If you are going to have to take on new developer resources anyway then a re-write from scratch might not be such a bad thing.