[dllthomas]

Copyright cares about provenance, though. If you put out a book called "Jimmy Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" and your work was more or less identical to "Harry Potter" and you had never encountered Harry Potter, directly or indirectly, then you wouldn't be guilty of copyright infringement. Of course, proving that would be difficult, given the spectacularly low odds of just happening to write the same tens of thousands of words.

In this case, if the algorithm is one of a narrow range of obvious algorithms, "just happened to..." might be more believable.