Re: DEP-5: Please clarify the meaning of "same licence and share copyright holders"
Noah Slater <nslater@tumbolia.org> writes:
> It depends what you hope to achieve by adding this information.
>
> Ranges of years are not legally recognised for copyright purposes,
I looked at this a while back and saw no evidence that this was true,
although of course I'm not a lawyer. I know that the FSF says to not
use ranges, but that doesn't mean there's some underlying clear legal
principle, just that they're taking the most conservative approach.
According to the US Copyright office, the only date required in a US
copyright notice is the first date of publication, or in the case of "a
compilation incorporating previously published material" (which I think
is a close match to the normal software case), the year of first
publication of the compilation. The relevant publication is at:
http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ03.pdf
This of course applies only to the United States.
> Does Debian only care about listing copyright holders, as opposed to
> reproducing legally meaningful copyright statements? If so, why not
> just list names here, excluding the word "Copyright" and excluding the
> years.
Because we have to comply with licenses that say that we need to
reproduce the copyright notice.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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