Interesting, but by that reasoning, couldn't I legally copy any font (and have it legally be my own work) simply be rasterizing it at a sufficiently large size and then vectorizing the result?
That's more or less how contemporary font clones are made. Rasterize, use auto-tracing software to produce new font curves, done. You can't directly copy any embedded programs from the original, such as hinting or kerning code, though. Kerning often ends up being tweaked manually (though with enough samples you could infer it from the original output), and then for quick-n-dirty clones hinting is just left to your font engine's autohinting algorithms.
There's a bit of angst about this in typography forums, and social pressure among typophiles and some subset of designers to avoid using "ripoff" fonts.
It would be an interesting project, if nothing else simply as a statement about copyright, to write a program that automates this process and automatically rips a font file this way. By producing samples with characters placed at different fractional positions, you should even be able to infer the hinting information without directly reading it.
