More or less - this kind of thing does happen, but not by as technical means as extracting the hinting from the font (because you would need to provide new hint

More or less - this kind of thing does happen, but not by as technical means as extracting the hinting from the font (because you would need to provide new hinting anyway for it to look any good, and you get into a complex knowledge firewall situation doing that). Instead, it's common for font foundries to design a new font based on the result of an existing one, creating an effective duplicate font divorced of copyright claim. It's pretty common for a few differences to be inserted though, I think less out of concern over copyright and more so that it's possible to determine which font was used for license enforcement of the new one. This prominently happened with Arial, which is a copy of Helvetica designed by Monotype so that they could stop paying fees to license Helvetica from Linotype as part of their font offerings for early raster printers (back when fonts were embedded in the print engine). There are numerous other examples, to the extent that if one foundry offers a font which is particularly popular, the other major foundries probably also offer their own "version" of it.