One of the ways copyright and patents differ is that patents can be infringed even if it's proven you had no prior knowledge of said patent, but copyright requi

One of the ways copyright and patents differ is that patents can be infringed even if it's proven you had no prior knowledge of said patent, but copyright requires actual copying to infringe. Independently arriving at the same API name is a defense from copyright violations. If both of us write the exact same method name, and we can both prove we didn't copy the other's, that's enough. We both have copyright over our own api call that we wrote. Copyright probably shouldn't apply in any case that we could both independently create the same thing (in the same way the sentence "Hi, how are you" isn't copyrightable, but a chapter of shakespeare is -- the former is not a real expression of unique creativity). So no, copyright does not determine the "1 true owner" of something that was not copied. That's patents.