Bug#659574: lintian: legally wrong statement: copyright-with-old-dh-make-debian-copyright
Osamu Aoki <osamu@debian.org> writes:
> Summary:
> copyright-with-old-dh-make-debian-copyright is giving a legally
> incorrect statement to lintian users in very annoying way. It is best
> removed immediately. -p0 patch attached.
I'm fairly certain that your analysis is incorrect, but we can probably
reword the tag to make that somewhat clearer.
> The fist sentence is correct but second and third sentences are legally
> wrong since 1988 even in USA.
> In 1988, USA finally joined "Berne Convention for the Protection of
> Literary and Artistic Works"[1] by "Berne Convention Implementation Act
> of 1988"[2]. (Almost all other industrialized nations signed it already
> by then.) This shifted the legal framework of copyright from Anglo-Saxon
> concept of "copyright" to the French "right of the author" (droit
> d'auteur) and removed the general requirement for registration of
> copyright works and eliminated the mandatory copyright notice.
This is all true, but has nothing at all to do with what Lintian is
saying.
> The statement of "(C) is not considered as a valid way to express the
> copyright ownership." is even harmful for Debian if we accept this since
> this is a widely used method.
I'm fairly sure (having read the relevant law several times, as well as
legal analyses of it) that Lintian's statement is correct in US law,
although possibly poorly phrased.
The statement is, as with the similar statement from the FSF, not about
any required copyright notice to declare ownership. As you state, under
Berne, such notices are not required. *However*, US law (I can't speak to
other countries, having not studied that) also establishes requirements
for copyright notices, which include using either Copyright or an actual
C-in-a-circle symbol. These copyright notices are not required to have
copyright on a work, but they *are* required in some situations to sue for
damages. In other words, they affect the implementation and judgements
around copyright, not the ownership.
Copyright notices are completely optional. But *if* you're going to add
one, you should add one in the proper format so that you can take
advantage of the full protection of the law in those countries that draw
this distinction.
> Also, I wonder if this recommendation is true, why we have the following
> in lintian source :-)
> $ grep -r "©" *|wc -l
> 25
> $ grep -r "(C)" *|wc -l
> 203
Because the Lintian source (as with quite a lot of other source) is full
of notices of the form "Copyright (C)". The "(C)" is meaningless, but
also harmless.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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