Re: logwatch: list of copyright holders

[Ben Finney <bignose+hates-spam@benfinney.id.au>]

Please preserve attribution lines for material that you quote, so we
can see who wrote what at each level.

Willi Mann <willi@wm1.at> writes:

> > The default suggestion would be for you (or people you can trust
> > to do the work) to contact those further upstream who could tell
> > you about the copyright status of each part of the work; repeat
> > until done, continue in perpetuity.
> 
> Can you explain to me what the consequences of an imcomplete list of
> copyright holders would be?

Apart from the fact that (as I'm sure you've considered) it's
impossible to prove a negative, i.e. it's impossible to prove "there
are no copyright holders to this work that we don't know about"...

One compelling reason to seek an accurate list of copyright statements
for a work is that, if there *is* a copyright holder that goes
undeclared, a recipient will have no explicit license from that
copyright holder to perform actions otherwise reserved to that
copyright holder, and thus will be violating that holder's copyright
if they perform such acts.

-- 
 \              "Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does |
  `\           knowledge." —Charles Darwin, _The Descent of Man_, 1871 |
_o__)                                                                  |
Ben Finney