Re: debian/* license of non-free packages
Bart Martens <bartm@debian.org> writes:
> It's what happens in practice when I submit a patch upstream and don't
> say anything about my copyright. Upstream integrates the patch in the
> upstream source code and redistributes the result with upstream
> copyright and license. I think that this happens quite a lot.
The Berne Convention effectively says that the copyright notice on a file
is meaningless when it comes to determining the copyright holder or
holders for the file's contents. That was one of the major
standardizations in the Berne Convention: you no longer have to declare or
register copyright in works. It happens automatically when the work is
created.
I don't know the law in all legal environments, but at least in the United
States, the only legal purpose that the copyright notice serves is that it
makes it difficult or impossible for the defendant to claim inadvertant
violation and it makes additional legal damages possible in a lawsuit. It
has no bearing on the actual copyright owners of a work and is completely
optional.
The primary reason why Debian cares about copyright notices is that most
of our licenses require their preservation and (as a distant second) it
can make it easier to research contributors if there's some sort of
dispute. There's no actual legal need for them unless the license
requires them.
In at least US law, and I'm fairly certain EU law as well, unless you have
explicitly signed a legal contract to transfer your copyright interest to
some other party, you still hold the copyright on every creative work that
you've made, including any patches that you've written that qualify as
creative works. Whether or not you added a copyright, whether or not the
modified files are marked as such, and even if someone else slapped their
copyright notice on it.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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