They didn’t copy the gods, they just said it’s the same guy under a different name and we worship them too.

It’s like foreign fans of a domestic TV show.

When I decide to worship Gandalf, I'm declaring a fair-use exemption.

While no modern copyright laws existed, there was a framework to protect intellectual properties and limit or prevent plagiarism in at least ancient Greece and Rome. The Athenian legal requirements to protect dramatic works is kind of the basis for our laws today.

Rather than go to war over the similarities between their gods, they went to war over the small differences in the copies.

They’d have to prove they created the god in question first, which would undermine every other claim they made for it.

I want to hear generic Beethoven