Or recordable tape, or VCRs, or art reprints.
And then there were the endless lawsuits over the "theft" from sampling and remixes.
The medium evolves. Some artists evolve with them, while others are left behind.
There's very much an arbitrary judgment call here. Bob James probably had a case with Run DMC Peter Piper (which is take me to the Mardi gras) but he's always been really chill about it. They lucked out.
Same thing here. There's this amorphous "creative effort" that creates an abstract distance between the works. Unless the engineers can show an effort to respect and police this distance, I think things might get dicey