The article links to the "no copy?" site: http://www.kameli.net/nocopy/ which was highly influential in its own time...

Demos are ultimately about impressing, also copying without being seen as copying - if you literally copy/paste other people's stuff, that makes you "lame", but if you quote/reference it, if you one-up it - if your rivals put out a demo with 200 bobs, you put out one with 240 bobs - then you look cool and people look up to you.

I don't think many people would be too concerned that Amiga musicians sampled presets of existing synths before putting those sounds to use in an original composition that fits the Amiga's hardware limits. And they would think it _amazing_ if you could cover a well-known tune with any kind of fidelity in those tight memory limits.

I don't think many people are upset if coders reverse-engineer their rivals and they all share among the many hardware tricks you can do - because there's always someone looking to go one step further and is experimenting to find yet another new trick.

And finally, graphics artists weren't exactly penalised for re-drawing a Boris Vallejo by hand - it was difficult to do, and "the scene" liked those sorts of pictures (i.e. naked chicks and fantasy art).

Effectively there was not just "this is my original art and it's on message", but also "I can copy this well-known art, because i'm technically capable enough to do it, and you're not". And like the generative AI is doing today, or the camera did to paintings... back in the 1990s, scanners and photo editing software lowered the bar so much that even talentless fools could just scan in an image, rather than have the technical skills to reproduce it by hand, taking away what was otherwise a good channel for showing you had talent and others didn't.