Aka, that you could clone Harry Potter's plot, characters, and story while not copying each word of the book verbatim, and it still be a copy of Harry Potter.
Would that be a copyright infringement? Probably just trademark infringement at that point?
Copyright attaches to the actual text (illustrations, etc; whatever is “fixed in a tangible form”), not the ideas.
You could write a story about a boy of humble origins who is whisked off to a special school, discovers he’s special, and fights evil. There aren’t that many original plots, after all....
You’ll only get into trouble if the main character is called Harry Potter of 10 Privett Drive, where he resides with his mother’s sister and her awful family, and he later attends Hogwarts, etc.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_protection_for_ficti...
The merger and scenes a faire doctrine permit lots of overlap in terms of themes, tropes and set dressing. You could certainly write a coming-of-age story set in a magical boarding school; indeed, Harry Potter is neither the first nor the last such novel. One of the classic cases is Walker v. Time Life. The two works, which were found to be non-infringing, both start with a double murder of two cops (one Black, one white) in the South Bronx, both feature demoralized Irish-American cops, and both have similar tropes (rats, cop-talk, etc). A reviewer might reasonably describe it as derivative (and a few did, I think), but not legally so.
What you probably couldn't do is publish the (non-parodic) story of Perry Hotter and his substantially-similar adventures at Pigworts, though that's also absolutely spoiling for a trademark fight.
Music gets weird because it a) seems like there are a lot of possible note sequences but b) there aren't really.
I don't know if their beef is with copyright vs trademark.
Or in other words, a tiny fraction of the original work would essentially be allowed to monopolize the entire space of works involving magical kids going to school.
(And this is why Justice Thomas is widely regarded as the least competent justice of at least the past half century.)
Presumably the issue would be if one wrote a book substantially about the same character as Harry Potter who went through the same plot events in significant detail, but only 0.4% of the sentences were identical and the main character's name was Barry.
Thomas would allow copyright on code regardless of any creativity. This would destroy the software industry. Anyone who is first in time would monopolize entire swaths of software functionality.
And that is what he wants. Thomas is an ideologue, and his sole goal in allowing the copyrighting of code is to destroy the tech industry, which he views as hostile to Republicans. You can see it in the logic of his dissent, which would require the court to override decades of settled case law all supporting the proposition that code and other functional expression. In order to justify his nonsensical arguments, Thomas is forced to come up with an entirely new category of code that is not supported by legislative history or judicial history. Thomas' only justification for this category is...that it's "not fair" to a multi-billion dollar company that the non-copyrightable portions of their code were copied by another corporation. Pity the poor multi-billion dollar corporation, they just can't ever get a break.
Even he notes that his dissent is nonsensical when he admits "declaring code is 'inherently bound together with uncopyrightable ideas.'
This would sound like a convincing position if the company abusing them wasn't a trillionaire corporation. Oracle is literally "the little guy" here.
This case began in 2010 as Oracle attempting to smother a similarly sized competitor...after Oracle acquired the actual creators of Java.