This is how software law has long worked.
Samuelson 07 – Richard M. Sherman Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, former Professor at Harvard University, J.D. from Yale University.
Pamela Samuelson, “Questioning Copyright in Standards,” University of California, Berkeley, https://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~pam/papers/BC%20questioning%20standards.pdf
Alternative theories for deciding that industry standards, such as the AMA and ADA codes, as well as ISO country, language, and currency codes, may be ineligible for copyright protection come from the scenes a faire and merger doctrines and the policies that underlie them. The scenes a faire doctrine, originally developed to recognize that certain plot structures are to be expected from works exploring certain literary or dramatic themes, 117 has been adapted, especially in the software copyright caselaw, to recognize that expressive choices of subsequent authors may become constrained over time by the emergence of industry standards.118 The merger doctrine holds that if there is only one or a very small number of ways to express an idea, copyright protection will generally be unavailable to that way or those few ways in order to avoid protecting the idea.119 While most merger cases involve works that are uncopyrightable when first created,120 some cases have held that an initially copyrightable work may be disqualified for copyright protection over time, as the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals did in holding that governmental adoption of a privately drafted model law as the law caused the idea of this law and its expression to merge. 121