You're making an error that many programmers make when they reason about the law. The law is not a set of rules about technology. The law is mostly about inte

You're making an error that many programmers make when they reason about the law. The law is not a set of rules about technology. The law is mostly about intent. The technology that is used is for the most part, as we programmers commonly say, "merely an implementation detail." For example, the law says that you have to have a license to make a derivative work, and it is this particular law that is "the source of the GPL virus" in this situation. But whether or not you are making a derivative work does not have much to do with what bits of technology you use. Of course, the questions are related because choices of technology can make the question about whether you are creating a derivative work more believable on one side than the other. But if you making technology choices in the hope and on the sole basis that it has some impact on whether or not you are creating a derivative work, you are practicing cargo cult law, just the same as if you erase the experimental results table from your paper and hope it changes the gravitational constant. You're reasoning in the wrong direction. Just as random aside, this is the same kind of thinking that led to the predominance of magnet links instead of torrent files. There are some technical reasons to prefer one over the other, but some people seem to believe there is a legal distinction when there is not. The magnet link is just as legal or illegal as the torrent file it replaces. The question is whether one is engaged in contributory copyright infringement, not whether one does it with URLs or not.