That's a straw man argument. That's not what they did. They had a search engine with data (lots of it), using many of the same factors that Google does (page/domain authority, on-page markup, etc). The feed that algorithm a lot of data. One bit of data they feed it is search behvior of toolbar users (presumably ALL search engines).

In your scenario, that'd be a copy. In the reality scenario (described above), I think it's not.