Re: debian/copyright and po files
Hi Ben,
Apologies for the delayed response.
On Saturday, 16 June 2018 11:09 AM, Ben Finney wrote:
> Whether a person's creative work is restricted by copyright law, is a
> matter less for Debian project members and more for experts in copyright
> law.
>
> So your question could be intepreted in multiple ways:
>
>Are you asking, Does copyright law in some specific jurisdiction
> restrict the actions of the recipient conditional on license from the
> translators who contributed to that work?
>
> (That's what I understand by “do these people count as copyright
> holders”. It's a vexed question in many cases.)
>
> Are you asking, Must the Debian package list the translators separately
> in its ‘debian/copyright’ document?
> That question depends in part on the vexed legal question, above; it
> also depends in part on what level of documentation the FTP masters will
> accept for a package.
Definitely the second option, although I see how it relies on the answer
to the first question.
> As a practical matter, I find it sufficient to list “© 1984–1997 Foo Bar
> and others” (where “Foo Bar” is whatever primary party is recorded in
> the upstream source work) — *if* there is no special effort in the
> source work to document copyright more explicitly for translators.
Okay. Thanks for this. I'll need to go back and check all of the po files
again to see if an explicit copyright holder is listed.
> In the case (which I have not encountered) where the upstream work does
> specially record the copyright held by translators, I would use that
> information for the ‘debian/copyright’ document.
Good advice.
Thanks for your help.
Hugh
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