Programmers mostly do not understand law

> What do you make of that? In technical forums, programmers discussing licensing issues often put a lot of emphasis on the technical details of how one work uses or depends on another. I thought that was important too, and was surprised a bit by that lawyer's advice not really caring much about the fine technical details. Would you have a view on that yourself? (outside of licences that explicitly limit their scope to some specified technical boundary).

In my experience, most people talking about copyright law make absolutely no effort to find out what the law actually says. They blindly assume that the law works the way they intuitively think it ought to work, and then derive whatever conclusions they want to derive based on that assumption. This is not specific to programmers - I have seen the same behavior with artists and other creative types, especially when talking about generative AI.

In the case of programmers, there's a tendency to assume that law is like code. It runs on formal logic, everything is a bright-line rule, nothing is ever subjective, etc., and therefore you can "just" code your way around the law whenever it poses an inconvenience (in the same way as you can "just" code around an inconvenient API or whatever). This is not how the law actually works, so much programmer discourse about the law is hopelessly misguided or outright wrong. I say this as a programmer myself.

See also (much more succinctly): https://xkcd.com/1494/

In the specific context of (A)GPL and derivative works, the test is very fuzzy and not at all a bright line. bkuhn's reference to the AFC test is a good place to start if you're curious about the specifics. Another complicating factor is that copyright protects creativity, not functionality. APIs and other integration points may be seen as less creative and more functional, so their copyright protection is weaker or possibly nonexistent (see Google v. Oracle).