[PeterisP]

The general principle of copyright law is that copying/distributing work that combines multiple copyrightable parts requires the permission of every author/copyright holder. Copyright law does not attempt to establish a single owner for any given work, it's perfectly fine with multiple parties having copyright protections over a single work, in which case any of them has a practical veto to doing anything with the joint product, as permission to use 99% of the work isn't sufficient.

For a very common example, let's look at a translated book. Copying and distributing such a book requires separate permission from both the author of the book and the author of the translation; the translation is a derivative work, it's covered by the copyrights of the original book and the author, but the translator also holds independent copyright on the translation in addition to the author's interest.

IMHO a derivative work of a program patched with someoone else's code (no matter how small, as long as it meets the very low copyright law bar of 'the slightest touch of creative input') is quite similar.

But the specific case of Razor 1911 might be disqualified by US copyright law section 103a which says "[...] but protection for a work employing preexisting material in which copyright subsists does not extend to any part of the work in which such material has been used unlawfully."

[jerf]

Yes, as I said, many people have many opinions. I think you'd find you're in the minority on HN (and the Internet armchair lawyer's favorite cry of "Fair use! Fair use!" which means next to nothing the way it is typically used) but probably with the majority of copyright laywers.

However, it hasn't actually been settled. I've been watching. The question of whether you can bypass the matter of distribution by distributing a patch you definitely 100% solely own, but then the end-user is the one doing the combining, is not established.