Is it legitimate to access a Wordpress-based or Wordpress-powered Web site via the Startpage service’s Anonymous View feature?

Question

The Web site for the Wordpress software indicates that the software is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) v2 (or any later version of the GPL) from what I can tell. A thought that comes up is that when a user views a Wordpress-powered or Wordpress-based Web site, that the user could receive HTML markup and CSS styling data (among other things) that is licensed under GPLv2+. In addition, the user may receive GPL-licensed client-side scripting code.

There is a search engine, Startpage, which has a feature called Anonymous View. When a user has a list of search results after doing a search in Startpage, they can use the “Anonymous View” option by a search result to view that specific page in Anonymous View mode in Startpage. When a page is viewed in Anonymous View, the Startpage service remotely fetches the page and presents it to the user. Users can click hyperlinks in the page being viewed while remaining in Startpage’s Anonymous View. (A thought that comes up is whether the Startpage service alters or rewrites a Web page’s data when that page is viewed in Anonymous Mode and whether copies or modified copies of the retrieved Web page may be stored (hopefully temporarily) on servers that are part of the Startpage service.) More details are here. It is also possible to configure the Startpage service to specifically use US (United States) servers or to specifically use EU servers (EU probably referring to the European Union), or to use whichever servers are the closest or fastest.

Assume that I do the following:

1. I visit the Startpage site.
2. I go into the Startpage settings and I configure the Startpage service to only use EU servers. I indicate that the changes should be saved using a cookie. I then exit the Startpage settings page.
3. I do a Web search in Startpage and I receive a list of results.
4. Among the search results is a Web site that is not mine and that is Wordpress-based or powered by Wordpress. Perhaps the site also has a custom Wordpress theme and some custom Wordpress plugins that are GPL-licensed.
5. I select the Anonymous View icon for the Wordpress-powered site and the Startpage service retrieves and loads the site in Anonymous View.
6. For the Wordpress-powered site that is being shown in Anonymous View, I click on one of the site’s hyperlinks and the site goes to a different page of the same site.

The question is: At this point, am I still in compliance with the licensing of the GPL-licensed Wordpress software (in addition to any custom GPL-licensed theme or GPL-licensed plugins that the Wordpress-powered site has)?

Answer 1

Usually the website (the HTML code) is not under GPL License, even if the CMS (like WP) is. I believe that the question should be more generic. Something like: "Is a modifying proxy in compliance with GPL when it processes GPL-covered content of a website?"

What the modifying proxy does is taking the original website, copying the content (images, etc), changing the links, and providing this modified content to the user. The content is obviously changed (changed URLs), so the question is: does the proxy provide the respective source code? Yes, the source code is delivered in the HTML, JS etc. which it provides to the user. So no GPL-related problem.

There might be, however, an issue with the license of the website, its terms of use. If, for example, the author of the website had put the content under a CC-BY-ND License, then the proxy would be breaking the license, as the change in URLs can be considered a derivative work.

It is a different consideration if such a modification could be considered to fall under 'fair use'. That would obviously depend on a multitude of conditions and side aspects, which cannot be easily covered by a generic answer here.