Looking Forward to It

Looking Forward to It

I think it comes from us engineers preferring a world with clear-cut lines set by technical means, rather than fuzzy rules that care about some quite complex legal concepts (but completely ignore the technical concepts).

Add in the work imposed on you by being involved in a copyright case (not thinking about financial costs here, just the workload it adds as you talk with lawyers about what needs to be proven, what has to be disclosed/in discovery/whatever your local terms are), and it's not surprising that we want something clear and technical that we can point to and say "because of that barrier, it can't be copyright infringement".

And, of course, there's a huge incentive to be allowed to copy something otherwise than in accordance with its licence, so there's always going to be people who want to say "this barrier means that there's no infringement, therefore I can do the thing I want to do" (e.g. sell a proprietary GCC frontend for a new language with a binary-only GCC build), even though there's no legal backing for that position.