>>>>> "Russ" == Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> writes:
Russ> Marc Haber <mh+debian-bugs@zugschlus.de> writes:
Russ> The years are an annoying bit of pedantry. The short version
Russ> is that US copyright law requires a year in the notice, and
Russ> that year is supposed to represent a year in which a
Russ> copyrightable change was "published." The FSF a long time
Russ> back got legal counsel here and published guidance in the GNU
Russ> Maintainer Guidelines, and since I've never wanted to
Russ> reproduce that work, I tend to just follow them. They say:
The years matter because at least under US law, the most recent year in
which a change happened affects how long copyright potentially lasts.
fsf> Don’t delete old year numbers, though; they are
fsf> significant since they indicate when older versions might
fsf> theoretically go into the public domain, if the movie
fsf> companies don’t continue buying laws to further extend
fsf> copyright. If you copy a file into the package from some other
fsf> program, keep the copyright years that come with the file.
I appreciate that the FSF cares about old years and things going into
public domain. I think that we should value being able to coalesce
years more than we value that pedantry. I think the FSF has adequately
explained the legal rationale for their view, I think their legal
reasoning is sound (so we can rely on it), and I think it doesn't apply
to our needs (so we can do something else).
I don't think we should go so far as to only list the most recent year,
but I do think we should collapse things down to a range in
debian/copyright.
I always assumed from the current wording we could do so
and it's a significant surprise to me that you are arguing we cannot.
Obviously we should leave the notices in source files alone.
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