I was originally curious exactly what would be decided in a court case. After reading Richard's post and the comments, I believe it's whether a WordPress theme or plugin is inherently a GPL work if it's distributed. Is that right? That seems to contradict what he says within the post that "automatic downstream licensing" is absent from the GPL.

All this makes me wonder how much a court case would really help? A US based court decision wouldn't impact international businesses, right? There's no GPL police to enforce any of these rules. I'd guess the majority of us would hope a court rules that themes and plugins are derivatives, but what if they didn't? I think I prefer the self-policing nature of our community, and I think it's much more powerful/influential than a court decision would be. If a court ruled that themes and plugins didn't need to be released under the GPL, wouldn't we still encourage everyone to go GPL anyways?

I only bring this up out of curiosity and sorry @Automattic's legal team. I'm sure if this did go to court there would be a few billable hours in their future...