It's not just words, except to the extent the law is just words. You said there haven't been any cases involving the "virality portion" but there have. Just not under the "GPL makes other code GPLed" interpretation, because that, as we clearly agree, doesn't exist.
What you're calling the "virality portion" says that one of the ways you *are* allowed to use the code is as part of other GPLed software. If you're going to look for court cases that explicitly "involve" that, it would have to be someone either:
* using it as a defense, i.e. saying "we're covered by the GPL because the software we embedded this code in is GPL" (That will probably never happen because people don't sue GPLed projects for containing GPLed code), or
* coming into line with the GPL by open sourcing their own code as part of resolving a case (The BusyBox case [2] was an example of that).
If you just want cases where companies that were distributing GPL code in closed source software were prevented from doing so, the Cisco [1] and BusyBox [2] cases were both notable examples. That they were settled doesn't somehow make them a weaker "test of the GPL" - rather the companies involved didn't even attempt to argue that what they were doing was permitted. They came into line and coughed up. If you really must insist on one where the defendant dug in and the court ended up awarding damages, I don't think there have been any in the US but there has been one in France [3].
As for "nobody was ever claiming it does", the "viral" wording has been used for as long as the GPL has been around as a scare tactic for introducing exactly that erroneous idea. Even in cases where people understand what the license says, it leads to subtle misunderstandings of the law, which is why the Free Software Foundation discourages its use. (Also, you literally said, in these exact words, "the virality causing the whole LLM model to be GPL'd".)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_Foundation,_Inc.....
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BusyBox#GPL_lawsuits
[3] https://www.dlapiper.com/en/insights/publications/2024/03/wa...
I do greatly appreciate you talking about cases instead of leaving it at saying there isn't a part of the license and calling any discussion about it FUD.
The Cisco case was about distributing GPL binaries, not linking it with the rest of the code base and the rest of that code base then needing to be GPL. It's a standard license enforcement unrelated to the unique requirements of GPL.
The BusyBox case is probably the closest in the list, but as you already point out we didn't get a ruling to set precedent and instead got a settlement. It seems obvious what the ruling would be (to me at least), but settlement was explicitly not what is being talked about.
Bringing in French courts, they issued fines - they didn't issue the type of order this article talks about which is about releasing the entire thing involved at the time with GPL.
This isn't related to fear, uncertainty, or doubt about GPL. It's related to what has/hasn't already been ruled in the court systems handling this license before as the article skips past a bit. Even in the case we assume the courts will rule with what seems obvious (to me at least), it has a tangible difference in how these cases will be run, the assumptions they will have, and how long they will last.
TBC, I'm not talking about the article, which I've barely read but looks rather misguided as it seems to be talking about LLMs having to be GPLed because of training data, which is not something that would ever happen.
It has never been the case that including GPL code in your software automatically makes your software GPL or even requires you to make it GPL. If you do get sued because you are distributing GPL code in a way that colloquially "violates the GPL" (technically, rather, in way that is not covered by the GPL or by fair use or any other licence, so it violates copyright) you might choose to GPL your code as a way of coming into compliance, but doing so is neither the only way to achieve compliance (you can instead remove the GPL code, and companies with significant investments in their proprietary code typically do that), nor a remedy for the harm done by your copyright violation to date, which you will typically have to remedy financially, via damages or a settlement.
As for legally testing, you seem to be to wanting a court to explicitly adjudicate against something so obviously wrong that in well over 20 years of FSF enforcement (edit: actually around 40 years) no company has been daft enough to try and argue it in court.
It might help if you try and delineate exactly what sort of case you'd accept as proof of "enforceability" of "virality". I think it would have to be something like a company embedding GPL code in proprietary code and then trying to argue in court that doing so is explicitly permitted by the GPL, and sticking to their guns all the way to a verdict against them. I'm not sure whether that argument would be considered frivolous enough to get the lawyers involved censured, but I certainly doubt a judge would be impressed.
If it helps make it any clearer, if in defending against a case like this your lawyer were to try and argue that the GPL is invalid and somehow just void, you should fire them immediately because they're trying to do the legal equivalent of shooting their own feet off. The GPL is what allows distribution of code, and allowing things is all it can do, because it is a license (not a contract). It can't forbid anything, and removing it from the equation can only decrease the set of things you are allowed to do with the copyrighted code.
If you've barely read the article then I can understand why you mistook what and why the comment was trying to talk to in response to the virality portions of said article. It's pretty much an argument "because of court cases, this is how propagation of GPL to the whole LLM model could be forced in the future" and the comment was saying there is actually no case precedence at all about that because it never gets there (usually being something obvious with the copyright portions alone or settlement to release the GPL portions).
Including GPL code in your app requires/results in different things depending on how you do that. E.g. the way Cisco did it with binaries is different than doing it with static linking/ is different than dynamic linking/syscalls/apis is different than expanding the code directly. It's not possible to talk about it as generically as above, especially in context of discussion around an article adding a new method of interaction.
Yes, the point is precisely the article explicitly asks about this point being tested in court rulings and the comment is that it has never needed to go beyond settlement (usually not even that far). I also don't really agree with how the article assumes things around that in a few places, but that's neither here nor their to this point.
It's not that I want proof, it's that the article you admit to not reading sets out to look at court cases to "consider the path through which the theory of license propagation to AI models might be recognized in the future". In that regard it's pretty relevant to note past no court case, nor really the two ongoing in the article, involve propagation of the license to the whole entity yet.