(I'm not a Debian developer) On Mon, Dec 15, 2003 at 07:29:59PM +0000, Scott James Remnant wrote: > It's probably a good additional point that most of the standard > character sets have no ?? symbol and that there is no legal basis for > "(C)" being a valid representation of it. IANAL (but recently passed succesfully a computer science "Law and Computer Science" course), but 'legal basis'? I doubt that is needed for such a thing as the copyright sign, since under most countries' (including EU and US) copyright law, a work you authored is automatically 'copyright you'. Wether you simply write: "I wrote this", put the real or the `fake' (c) symbol in the file with your name, or even don't mention at all that the work is copyrighted by you (but for practical reasons, mentioning your name is useful). Google let me to [1], which does mention a benefit of using either the real copyright sign or the word 'Copyright' over the (C) representation (at least in the US): Copyright Law of the United States of America, item 401(d): Evidentiary Weight of Notice - If a notice of copyright in the form and position specified by this section appears on the published copy or copies to which a defendant in a copyright infringement suit had access, then no weight shall be given to such a defendant's interposition of a defense based on innocent infringement in mitigation of actual or statutory damages, except as provided in the last sentence of section 504(c)(2). Wether this whole section is applicable to software and its copyright-files is (for me) hard to tell since this section was written with tangible works in mind, rather than a mere series of bits and bytes. > On the other hand, policy states UTF-8 for Changelog which breaks katie > if your name contains accented characters because you're still forbidden > by policy to use UTF-8 in debian/control. Since UTF-8 isn't yet by default supported on all systems (at least not on my sarge system), I would rather choose for going on the safe side, using only 7-bit latin1. Because of [1], you should write 'Copyright' in full rather than (C) to be on the safe side in a legal sense. --Jeroen [1] http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap4.html -- Jeroen van Wolffelaar +31-30-253 4499 Jeroen@A-Eskwadraat.nl http://Jeroen.A-Eskwadraat.nl
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