I find this hard to believe. If I took the famous pointillism painting "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" (the one-color-per-dot painting of a park) and I rearranged every color point based on an algorithm to create something that looks nothing like the original (and likely just looks like a jumbled mess), surely the copyright on the existing painting (which I doubt exists anymore) wouldn't prevent me from copyrighting my "new" work.