Copyright is the entity that came first. A copyright license is the object you can use to claim you have permission to do something which copyright declares ill

Copyright is the entity that came first. A copyright license is the object you can use to claim you have permission to do something which copyright declares illegal by law. We can put gpl first when trying to determine the intersection of all the set of permissions when dealing with multiple licenses, but in the end the fundamental question to be answered is: Do you have a set of permissions to do something which copyright makes illegal. Yes/No. In the case of multiple copyrighted work you need permission for all that which copyright limits in those cases. If we want to look at it from a game theory perspective it we would ask who the agents are, their goals, the environment and the resources. Here a narrow intersection can be a cost, or it can be irrelevant depending on context. The biggest permission is always to write it yourself which make the limitation of copyright a non-issue for the author. Naturally that is not the only factor, nor the only agent, so it all depend.