The implication that this is a practice being used to skirt copyright is wrong. In almost all cases the font foundry is commissioned by a company to produce a distinct (or not so distinct as the case may be) variant of a typeface/family, licensed to them for their use - as an alternative to having the foundry create an entirely new typeface from scratch.

The point I'm making is that you can simply modify an already existing font "just enough" for it to be considered a new work.

This is essentially what happened with Arial w/ Helvetica; and companies have been doing this ever since to create new licenses that they can control.

We are drowning in Grotesk/Sans-Serif/Helvetica type fonts! Do we really need another "Big Tech Sans"? Or rather, why can't Twitter just use X? xD

At least there is no copyright on the alphabet.

Yet.