Alexander Terekhov wrote:
The doctrine of privity in contract law provides that a
contract cannot confer rights or impose obligations arising
under it on any person or agent except the parties to it
As usual, that is irrelevant to the operation of the GPL, which
is a license grant from the copyright holders to people who wish
to copy and distribute the covered works. The only person who has
any obligations imposed upon himself is the person doing the
copying and distributing, who is one of the two parties to the
GPL, the other being the copyright holder.