Intent certainly matters in the domain of intellectual property law. For example, imagine that I were to instruct someone to make a device for me, and they mad

Intent certainly matters in the domain of intellectual property law. For example, imagine that I were to instruct someone to make a device for me, and they made it exactly according to my design, and it performed some novel function that I had predicted it would. Under current law, I would be the inventor, not the person who constructed the device. This is since the "inventive step" was performed by myself. I'm not however sure how this relates to copyright (the issue at hand in the OP)... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inventive_step_and_non-obviousness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inventive_step_and_non-obvious...