Re: Question Regarding Copyright

[Jonathan Yu <jonathan.i.yu@gmail.com>]

Hi Frank:

Thanks for the really quick reply.

On Sat, Jul 11, 2009 at 3:02 PM, Frank Lichtenheld<djpig@debian.org> wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 11, 2009 at 02:43:28PM -0400, Jonathan Yu wrote:
>> It should be noted that we are currently working on fulfilling ITPs
>> for Coro (libcoro-perl) and its dependency, Guard (libguard-perl),
>> which have similar copyright issues (the copyright statement is
>> missing, but the license information is present). I'm not a lawyer,
>> but I'm told that this is okay per the Berne Convention, since
>> copyright is implicitly granted to the author of software, so I think
>> that's the main reason why Marc Lehmann doesn't feel the need to add
>> an explicit copyright statement.
>
> AFAIK, this is correct yes. Copyright is established without needing
> to explicetly claim it.
>
> Which doesn't excuse you from documenting it in debian/copyright. And if in
> doubt, always add everything relevant directly into debian/copyright.
I take this to mean that if there is no upstream copyright
information, we can cull the copyright years/etc from the Changes
file, and assume that upstream author is the copyright owner?

Ideally the upstream author would identify such information
themselves; in the case where such information is missing (either
license or copyright), our policy in the Debian Perl team is to
contact the upstream maintainer and ask. There is also the case where
upstream is not responsive (though the merit of unmaintained/abandoned
software in Debian is questionable at best).

But as mentioned in our case, the author simply doesn't *want* to put
the copyright statement clearly, so unless we can effectively say that
the information from the upstream Changes file is sufficient, then we
have to include the e-mail (and author's response) as a rationale for
the copyright line. Unfortunately then, the e-mail is a bit long, and
clutters the debian/copyright file beyond what is actually important
(it would be a long-winded X-Comment field simply to say that we got
the copyright info from upstream via e-mail).

> While I would say that this is more important in the case of license
> statement than in the case of copyright statements, the preference
> is always for the debian/copyright file to be self-contained (with the
> defined exception of /usr/share/common-licenses).

I look forward to your response. Thanks again!

Cheers,

Jonathan