Yes, copying is innovation.

I'm yet to see an example when a community proceeded with copying for an extensive period of time and didn't come up with innovations. Also I'm yet to see an example when a community didn't copy things already existing in the field. It's just not how it works.

E.g. Phonecian alphabet -> hebrew -> greek -> latin, cyrillic. Even hangul were drawing insights from both hieroglyphs and alphabets.

And, more often than not, "clone of X" means "tl; dr; but it looks like X". People seldom bother.