I am having trouble understanding Section 9 of the GPL v3 license:9. Acceptance Not Required for Having Copies.You are not required to accept this License in order to receive or run a copy of the Program. Ancillary propagation of a covered work occurring solely as a consequence of using peer-to-peer transmission to receive a copy likewise does not require acceptance. However, nothing other than this License grants you permission to propagate or modify any covered work. These actions infringe copyright if you do not accept this License. Therefore, by modifying or propagating a covered work, you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so. As far as I can understand, I'm allowed to give copies of my GPL licensed work if I directly provide it to a peer, or a friend as mine. It seems that the license doesn't apply if they modify it, but it doesn't look like if it applies if they link or something. Can someone tell me what this clause in the license means?
Can I just remove the GPL license if I give something to a friend?
gpl 3
My understanding is that GPL only applies to people who distribute copies of the code to other people.So anybody who receives the GPL'd code is not bound by the terms of the license unless they also give copies of the code to other people. And then at that point they are bound by the terms of the license (but only as it applies to the code that they distributed).It seems that the license doesn't apply if they modify it, but it doesn't look like if it applies if they link or something.That's right, modifying the code is not infringing on normal copyright and also doesn't trigger GPL.Just don't distribute your modified code to anybody without complying with GPL.That paragraph is just stating (and clarifying) how copyright law works. I don't think it actually does anything. Under copyright law, you cannot distribute somebody's work unless they give you permission. For GPL licensed code, the only way you can get permission is if you comply with the license.If you're not distributing the code, then you don't need permission to do whatever it is you're doing and you don't need to comply with the license.Edit:In several other places, the GPL clearly states that you must include the license in any copies you make, for example section 5.b):The work must carry prominent notices stating that it is      released under this LicenseThis means that if you give a copy of the code to your friend, you must not remove the license.However that restriction only applies to you. Your friend can remove the license as long as they do not give that modified copy to anybody else (then they would have to put the license back in place).Section 9 is stating that your friend is allowed to remove the license as long as they don't make copies (where a copy is as defined under copyright law (distributing a work to somebody else), not as defined by doing cp -a or right clicking to make a copy).