I mean ”hey artist, take this stolen character and make them legally distinct” is already a common thing.

there are event exact measurements to take into account, for visual art, music etc. 'what is legally not stealing'.

Art, however, is a little different than code. code is a thing, but it also produces things.

It weirds me out there is a measure of code similarity but not a measure of if code is semantically the same. for example implementing a protocol could be done in many ways, but ultimately whats talked between clients/servers on the network is the same. so it's semantically the same despite being totally different code.