alt Hacker NewsI do not agree with your interpretation of copyright law. It does ban copies: there has to be information flow from the original to the copy for it to be a "copy." Spontaneous generation of the same content is often taken by the courts to be a sign that it's purely functional, derived from requirements by mathematical laws.
Patent law is different and doesn't rely on information flow in the same way.
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I disagree that information flow is required. Do you have a reference for that? Certainly it is an important consideration. But consider all the real literary works contained in the infinite library of babel.[1] Are they original works just because no copy was used to produce them?
Well discovery might be a fun exercise to see if the code is in the dataset of the llm.
Derivative works can also run afoul of copyright. An LLM trained on a corpus of copyrighted code is creating derivative works no matter how obscure the process is.