Imagine how awkward it would be if Google owned the copyright on all the documentation except that byte. I don't blame them at all.

And of course, even if you delete the byte you still have a derived work.

If you can copyright a single byte, I'm going to copyright the null byte. Literally every C program in the world will need licensing from me.

You need to copyright a specific null byte. It only counts as infringement if someone copies it from you.

Random aside: I think it is amazing that first you found this commit + posted about it, then that I saw your post about it on HN.. was kinda ridiculous process to have to agree to the CLA, but I was pleasantly surprised by the automation + instantaneous approval...

- the person who made said commit :-)

I was amazed at what a good sport you were about it. I'm not sure I would have seen it through.

It's ridiculous on the face of it, but at what point do you need to have a CLA signed? 10 bytes? Having an arbitrary cutoff for what needs a CLA or doesn't, I think, is probably even worse than having a CLA.

GNU Emacs says this[1]:

  We can accept small changes (roughly, fewer than 15 lines) without
  an assignment.  This is a cumulative limit (e.g. three separate 5 line
  patches) over all your contributions.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/CONTRIBUTE (in the Copyright Assignment section)

That byte is not copyrightable, it's as simple as that.

It follows the rules on what is copyrightable.

So mechanical changes (for example reformatting text), that involve no creativity are not copyrightable and IMO would not need a CLA even if they were very extensive.

On the other hand a single line with complicated and creative code would.

Like all things human it's subjective, there is no bright line but courts have definitely dealt with this issue (often in the context of plagiarism of musical passages).

It sounds like they do not look at the content of the submission until the CLA is in place, so they would not necessarily know that it was a 1 byte change.

This is how rule of law looks like. No exceptions for friend of friends, or the second cousin to the mayor.

It does occasionally lead to seemingly absurd situations, but there it is.

How does the submitter propose the automated system should be tweaked? What is the problem that they have identified?

I think he implicitly argues that it shouldn't be tweaked because it's funny.