[cturner]

Depends whether you think of law as being the ultimate good, or something else.

If you had civil-rights objections to copyright then you'd perceive the GPL as a neat hack around it but be looking for something to destroy it.

Thinking about the rule of law as an ultimate good is a valid position.

I've actually tried this, and you get into contrived situations like this one: the boss shows you a four line perl script in use at a client site that another company wrote ten years ago, and asks you to modify it in a trivial way to solve an important problem. You'll respond that you aren't allowed to do that for breach of copyright - unless the client company specifically relinquished the code then the rights vest with them. Further, you will explain that you can now no longer write code to replicate the functionality of it because you have been influenced by having read the code of the client company.

Advocates of the rule of law should oppose laws that are selectively enforced, and absurdly complicated.