[wahern]

Unlike patent law which protects novelty, copyright only protects originality. Violating copyright requires actual copying of material.

Theoretically, you could independently conceive of Count Dracula[1] and put him into your own work without violating someone else's copyright. To prove violation of copyright the copyright holder must as a preliminary matter provide evidence that the defendant likely had access or exposure to the copyrighted material. Only once that evidence exists could the fact finder infer, based on similarity, actual copying. For widely disseminated pop cultural material, however, exposure is a rather easy burden to meet.

[1] I presume for the sake of argument that the character Count Dracula is per se copyrighted. But I don't think that's true. AFAIU only certain stylized versions of that character are copyrighted. This necessarily follows from the fact that to show violation of copyright you must first identify the specific material that has been copied, and then show substantive similarity and the extent of copying. IMO modern copyright law is too liberal in this regard (i.e. favors copyright holders) and has gotten rid of many bright line rules that rejected infringement claims early on. But all of this absolutely matters if you're going to trial. The Oracle v Google case was fundamentally about how to construe similarity and extent in the context of APIs.