> In that case the Code, copyright, was not transferred to the employee, They are not operating under the conditions of the GPL at all. In this scenario let's

> In that case the Code, copyright, was not transferred to the employee, They are not operating under the conditions of the GPL at all. In this scenario let's say that the patches are GPLv2 licensed and apply to a larger GPLv2 codebase, as opposed to something like a separate kernel module. So the code is, indeed, GPL, and both the built kernels and the source itself are unambiguously a derivative work of GPL code. And this code is distributed to you as part of your job. It wasn't stolen, it was provided to you with specific terms of use, namely that it only be used within the company. Is your argument that there can be no legal constraints beyond what "the GPL says" in this situation? That those constraints shouldn't apply, because they infringe your GPL-provided rights?