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Re: [MoM] r-cran-nnls: please fix copyright



Hi Andreas

2015-05-19 7:08 GMT+01:00 Andreas Tille <andreas@an3as.eu>:
Hi Alba,

On Mon, May 18, 2015 at 10:43:58PM +0100, Alba Crespi wrote:
> 2015-05-18 21:21 GMT+01:00 Andreas Tille <andreas@an3as.eu>:
>
> > A missing Copyright field
> >
> >    missing-field-in-dep5-copyright
>
> There is no copyright holder, since it's public domain!
>
> I can list the author there, but that's not really correct.

We are now diving in the field of law where at least I feel totally
incompetent and I just repeat what I was told and what I understand with
my poor background.  There are countries (for instance Germany) where as
an author you can not "loose" your copyright as an author.  There is a
difference between copyright and a license.  To put something under
publich domain means you give permission to everybody to do whatever the
user wants to do.  However, you remain the author of the code and will
never loose this status.

>From a Debian point of view I can tell you that it is safe to list the
author under Copyright and public-domain as license.  This is what
ftpmaster wants you to do to accept the package (at least to my
experience) and I think this makes some sense to fit different law
systems.

Well, I found a discussion about how to describe public-domain files in the machine readable copyright format:

#694883

which you can see here:
http://bugs.debian.org/694883

This bug report also references a discussion starting here:

https://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2012/12/msg00000.html

Thread view:

https://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2012/12/threads.html#00000

So as far as I understand in this case it should be ok to put:
 Copyright: none


Cheers,
Alba

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