Re: Copyright and License Guidelines
gregor herrmann <gregoa@debian.org> writes:
> I understand ftp-masters' policy to be that a copyright statement is
> required for accepting new packages into the archive.
> Not that there's much documentation about that, what I've found is:
> http://ftp-master.debian.org/REJECT-FAQ.html ("Copyright" in the left
> column, linking to
> http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2006/03/msg00023.html
> and
> http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2003/12/msg00007.html )
> Am I misreading these statements, or is the position not covered by
> Debian's policies?
I think that Joerg's point was that Debian Policy says that you have to
include the upstream copyright information along with the license, so if
upstream provides one, it needs to be there. I've never heard of anyone
having a problem with synthesizing a copyright notice based on the known
author and release dates for the purposes of documentation, and if we had
a module where for some reason that wasn't a reasonable thing to do, I'd
debate the point with ftp-master over whether the copyright notice should
be required for acceptance into the archive. It's very clearly not
required by US copyright law and by the Artistic license, and it would
surprise me if anyone else required it either.
If upstream is using *only* a license that requires a copyright notice,
like the GPL, and distributes it without a copyright notice, one could
argue that they're not satisfying the terms of their own license and hence
their software is unredistributable. I personally think that's
hair-splitting and the intent is obvious (and intent matters in law), but
sure, if someone wants to go to the effort of sorting that out with
upstream, I'm not going to object. Personally, I'd just synthesize the
obvious copyright statement and move on with my life, which would make the
copyright statement as accurate as 50% of the free software out there.
This is just not something the broader community cares about, and unlike
the exact terms of licenses, it's also hard to see any legal impact from
not caring about it.
(Note that, similar to my other arguments, there's nothing in US law that
says that if you put a copyright notice on a work, you're promising that
notice is therefore comprehensive and includes all copyright holders. In
US law, he copyright notice really doesn't have any impact on anything
except the damage phase of a successful copyright infringement lawsuit.)
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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