It's a question of not copying the masters, to look for something, good or bad, for oneself. To enter this liberated state of mind, one cannot copy the others. ↗
The music is a personal expression, like art. It is something that you like doing that comes from within, and is an expression that comes from God. That is why artists are beautiful and why people who copy are not really artistic. ↗
I am not the German Tony Blair. Nor am I the German Bill Clinton. I am Gerhard Schroeder, chancellor of Germany, responsible for Germany. I don't want to be a copy of anyone. ↗
I used to cut guitars out of a piece of cardboard to copy the Strat look. I used a backwards tennis racket for a while and graduated to the cardboard cutout. ↗
In practice, the copyright system does a bad job of supporting authors, aside from the most popular ones. Other authors' principal interest is to be better known, so sharing their work benefits them as well as readers. ↗