For access it could be a little tricky, certainly every one that has posted a reply here has had access, and if this post is popular enough it could be argued anyone could or has had access (this happened in some music cases in the last few years).
For Substantial Similarity your definitely in trouble if you have exactly 3 blank lines and probably in trouble if you have 2 or 4 blank lines, but you may be fine if you have like 6 or 12 blank lines.
While I'm being a bit sarcastic about the number of lines being "substantially similar", the legal standard in the US is not if you actually copied something, but if the plaintiff can convince a judge/jury that it's more likely that you copied it than it is that you created it on your own.
In other words, if you use Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V to copy these blank lines, then you infringe AT&T copyright. If you don't and add blank lines by other means - you don't ;)
Independent derivation of a work is defense against copyright infringement.
Even if the copyright on these blank lines were to be valid, it would be reasonable to claim that your own use of blank lines was independent, not a derivative work copying from theirs.
Patents do not require actual copying to infringe, but copyright does. If you can prove you did not know of the original work, or otherwise would have come up with the same thing on your own, that's enough to absolve you of copyright issues.