Re: Files with "All rights reserved."
Mathieu Malaterre <malat@debian.org> writes:
> My pixelmed-java upload has been rejected for the following reason:
> o com/pixelmed/web/package.html is "Copyright all rights reserved"
> The only reference I could find about this, is the following [1]:
> http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=62656#p363466
> Could someone please point me to proper debian documentation
> explaining the issue with "all rights reserved".
"All rights reserved" was a magic legal phrase given meaning by the Buenos
Aires Convention, which required that phrase be present in order to get
international copyright protection under that convention. The Buenos
Aires Convention was an American (in the continental sense) copyright
agreement that predated American adoption of Berne.
All signatories to Buenos Aires are now signatories to Berne and have been
since 2000 when Nicaragua signed, so apart from some technicalities that
remain in effect in the broader context of Berne, it no longer has any
real effect. In particular, Berne eliminates the need for appending the
magic "All rights reserved" phrase in order to get international copyright
protection.
The short version is that it's a legal vestigiality, and you can usually
just ignore it. There is probably some upstream somewhere that
(confusingly) uses that as their (non-free) license statement, but as long
as a clear license statement accompanies a copyright statement with that
phrase, you can safely consider it legal boilerplate and ignore it.
I suspect the problem in this case is the lack of some accompanying clear
license statement.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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