&gt; If the courts threw up their hands and said &quot;It is literally impossible to adjudicate this issue of the binary kernel module&quot;, then who is left to enforce the copyright law?<p>The court would still be able to deal with the vast majority of copyright law, even if they decided that a specific license term was too vague to rule either way.<p>&gt; If a court said that, and an individual&#x2F;company wanted to ignore the GPL, then they could put all of their code into binary modules.<p>That&#x27;s not true for two reasons.  First, there are GPL violations that have nothing to do with binary modules, like a company embedding busybox and not distributing source code.  Second, we are talking about binary modules where the question of &quot;do they derive from the kernel&quot; doesn&#x27;t have a very clear answer.  In most cases if a company tried to hide their code in a binary module, it would still blatantly derive.  It would take a lot more engineering effort to get into the same gray zone as nvidio.ko and zfs.ko.  Also note that right now, today, you can put in significant engineering effort to create a binary module that isn&#x27;t affected by the GPL.  All you have to do is make a non-GPL program that exposes the same API.  But nobody goes through all this effort to skirt the GPL.  So I doubt in this alternate world people would spend a similar amount of effort, at least not very often.<p>&gt;  If a company&#x27;s proprietary code is in a binary format, there is no one available to enforce licensing rules, and the company knows those two facts, then what reason does that company have to fear from the GPL?<p>The courts would still in the general case enforce the rules, so they would fear legal action.<p>&gt;I&#x27;d also be curious to hear what you think the logical outcome of the binary kernal module license issue being unenforceable would be.<p>The situation at hand is not one of <i>all</i> binary modules being GPL-proof.  But even if they were, even if the GPL could do nothing at all about binary modules, it would still have uses.  Anytime someone used a GPL module, you would be able to get source code.  It would make the GPL act much like the LGPL.