Bug#659574: lintian: legally wrong statement: copyright-with-old-dh-make-debian-copyright
Osamu Aoki <osamu@debian.org> writes:
> I still think that this lintian report is *pedantic* to nitpick on one
> requirement and misses other requirements. Let me make a bit balanced
> requests.
> (2) explicitly mention US being a signatory to the Berne Convention
I don't see a need to single out the US here. It's just as relevant for
every other country in the world that has signed Berne (which is nearly
all of them). In all cases, copyright notices are not required.
> (3) change this to priority pedantic.
The only thing that raises it higher than pedantic to me is that it's a
bit of helper boilerplate. But on further consideration, I think you're
right and this is pedantic. That's kind of an annoying change because of
the test suite implications, but I'll try to get to it.
>> + <tt>(C)</tt> alone is not considered a valid copyright notice in at least
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>> + some countries. The word <tt>Copyright</tt> or the © symbol should be
>> + used instead or in addition to <tt>(C)</tt>.
>> + .
> If the new text was not a negative sentence but a simple affirmative
> sentence, I am fine. <--- for (1)
> For example:
> The use of the word <tt>Copyright</tt> or the © symbol is considered
> to be a part of a valid copyright notice requirement in at least some
> countries.
Looking at this again, I'll remove "at least" since we know that some
countries don't care about this. But I don't agree with your proposed
change, since the statement that (C) by itself is not a valid copyright
notice in some countries is simply a factual statement, and that is the
issue at hand. I don't want to be too indirect about what the issue is.
It's better to state things clearly.
> Do you know some previous case that the use of "(C)" alone for copyright
> notice caused some problem to establish prima facie case for
> infringement?
I don't know of a specific court case, but I know that this advice is
universal for copyright notices in the US. Every piece of legal advice on
the topic that I've ever seen that mentions (C) says that it's not legally
significant. Given how the law works, that in and of itself probably
makes it not legally significant when there's no specific law to the
contrary.
> In this respect, adding following may balances above issue: <--- for (4)
> In order to help such court case, it is also recommended to include
> proper copyright notice for each file or make build script print out
> such text.
> This may be an idea. But I sure will hate to see such terminal print
> out :-) That is another reason to make this pedantic.
I don't think we should go this far. :)
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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