Bug#47438: copyright statement needs updating?

[Raul Miller <moth@debian.org>]

On Sat, 23 Oct 1999 at 19:13, Raul Miller wrote:
> > > The original copyright holder does not own the copyright to those
> > > parts of the document he did not write.

> > He does, however, own the copyright on the document as a whole.
> > Fun, eh?

On Sun, Oct 24, 1999 at 08:57:21AM +0200, Brock Rozen wrote:
> No such thing -- he owns the copyright of the policy as it was until
> others started adding to it. At which point he only holds copyright on the
> section that he wrote, not the other ORIGINAL sections that others
> produced. (Again, I'm not discussing changes they made to his sections)
> 
> Somebody posted a url on this -- and essentially, that what I'm repeating.
> I no longer have the url.

Well, someone named Brock Rozen once posted this url:
http://lcweb.loc.gov/copyright/faq.html#q49

which referred to the following text:

   49. How much do I have to change in order to claim copyright in
       someone else's work?
       Only the owner of copyright in a work has the right to prepare, or
       to authorize someone else to create a new version of that work.
       Accordingly, you cannot claim copyright to another's work, no
       matter how much you change it, unless you have the owner's
       consent. See Circular 14.

In the specific case of debian-policy we have
/usr/doc/debian-policy/copyright which says that Ian Jackson holds
the copyright and that permission to modify and redistribute is under
GPL terms.  I know that policy.html/index.html has a slightly different
statement, but I don't know if Ian explicitly approved that or not.

Anyways, the question is legally ambiguous -- and the ambiguity is that
the author of a contribution to a GPLed work may not have intended for
that contribution to be a part of that GPLed work.  The FSF handles this
issue by asking contributors to works where FSF holds the copyright to
explicitly provide a signed statement giving the FSF the right to the
contributions.  Historically we've been a lot less fussy, both about
our own work and about upstream software.

In one sense, issue probably doesn't matter unless the copyright gets
challenged in court.  In court, you can only defend copyright which you
explicitly hold. Then again, we could try a class action suit against
someone violating the GPL...

In another sense, I think it's important that people understand what
copyright is going to go on their work (in this example, submissions
to debian-policy).  We probably don't have to have signed statements
from everyone, but from the legal point of view they'd only help.
[From the debian point of view, they might get in the way -- or they
might not.  In the particular case of debian policy I can see some
advantage to having an slow, deliberate process for changes.  I don't
know what's best here.]

Thanks,

-- 
Raul