That’s not the right way to approach this. There’s no way to subdivide a copyrightable work into portions that become uncopyrightable. Otherwise one could simpl

That’s not the right way to approach this. There’s no way to subdivide a copyrightable work into portions that become uncopyrightable. Otherwise one could simply split up the work, free themselves of copyright, and reassemble the pieces. A work is by definition an assembly of pieces; it is not meaningful to talk about copyright at the piece level. The way it actually works is that very small portions of a work are still under copyright but their copying is regarded as de minimis, so small as to be permitted. For example, sampling a single snare dum hit from a song. Copying a color is even less than that, it’s like copying a single word from a book, it’s a piece from which the work is made up but it’s not a work, it’s not even a portion of a work.