non-English copyright

[Atsuhito Kohda <kohda@pm.tokushima-u.ac.jp>]

Hello all,

I am a member of Debian JP and wish to be a Debian developer
and I saw many problems discussed in this mailing list on
copyright files. Here is another problem I wish to ask.

There are many programs developed by Japanese programmers
which have copyright written in Japanese.

When we debianize these programs, is it possible to use
Japanese copyright as copyright file of Debian packages ?

I am afraid you will answer it is impossible but please note;

- if the Japanese author(s) and/or maintainer(s) translate
Japanese copyright to English, it may contains many possible
errors in English usages.

- I do not know about law at all but perhaps from a legal point
of view only the original copyright is effective and the translated
one has only a meaning as a reference at most.

For example, GPL is translated to Japanese by many professional
members but the translated GPL declares as follows;

 	We translate the original as carefully as we can
	with the suggestions of lawyers, but it is not
	effective legal license.

The above sentence is translated by me without the suggestions
of anyone so, of course, it is never effective one but I hope
it is fundamentally correct translation :-)

I know that this is not a simple problem and I do not want to
claim that you should accept Japanese copyright but I would like
to know the opinions of members of Debian in the first place.

Thanks in advance,		1999.6.4

--
 Debian JP Developer - much more I18N of Debian
 Atsuhito Kohda <kohda@pm.tokushima-u.ac.jp>
 Department of Math., Tokushima Univ.