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Re: Copyright assignement for Debian tools?



On Sat, Feb 09, 2013 at 09:03:09PM -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
> "Jonathan Carter (highvoltage)" <jonathan@ubuntu.com> writes:
> > On 10/02/2013 03:14, Paul Wise wrote:
> 
> >> My advice would just to put "Copyright 2013 Thomas Koch" and a
> >> DFSG-free license, anything else would be more effort on your part.
> 
> > I've considered using "Copyright 2013 Debian Project" for the licensing
> > of packaging that's intended to go into Debian. What would happen if I
> > do that? Would the package get rejected? Is it possible for an entity
> > like Debian to gain copyright to something if it's more or less
> > unknowingly?
> 
> I'm not sure what the ftp-team would do, but that statement is basically
> legally meaningless.  It doesn't change the fact that you personally hold
> the copyright, it doesn't give anyone in Debian (or Software in the Public
> Interest) the ability to defend the license in court... it basically has
> the same amount of effect as putting "the moon is made of green cheese" in
> your packaging.  (There may be some impact on seeking statutory damages in
> countries like the US where damages can change based on the presence of a
> copyright notice, but that's pretty much an edge case.)

There are several cases where upstream explicitly puts "Copyright 2013 The Foo
Developers" and similar statements. Are they invalid as well? If they are
valid, wouldn't "Copyright 2013 Debian Project" have the similar (if not the
same) meaning?

A small sample from the packages I have on my system (`grep -i copy.*developer
/usr/share/doc/*/copyright`):

Copyright: 2006, 2007 Rob Buis <buis@kde.org> / 2008 Apple Inc. All Rights Reserved / 2002, 2003 The Karbon Developers:
Copyright: 2002, 2003 The Karbon Developers:
Copyright: 2002, 2003 The Karbon Developers / 2007, 2009 Apple, Inc. All rights reserved:
Copyright: 2006, 2007 Rob Buis <buis@kde.org> / 2008 Apple Inc. All Rights Reserved / 2002, 2003 The Karbon Developers:
Copyright: 2002, 2003 The Karbon Developers:
Copyright: 2002, 2003 The Karbon Developers / 2007, 2009 Apple, Inc. All rights reserved:
Copyright: 2006, 2007 Rob Buis <buis@kde.org> / 2008 Apple Inc. All Rights Reserved / 2002, 2003 The Karbon Developers:
Copyright: 2002, 2003 The Karbon Developers:
Copyright: 2002, 2003 The Karbon Developers / 2007, 2009 Apple, Inc. All rights reserved:
Copyright © 2005-2010 The Poppler Developers
Copyright: 2005-2009, NumPy Developers
Copyright © 2005-2010 The Poppler Developers
Copyright © 2005-2010 The Poppler Developers
Copyright © 2005-2010 The Poppler Developers
Copyright © 2005-2010 The Poppler Developers
Copyright: 2002, 2003 The Karbon Developers
Copyright (c) 2005-2009, NumPy Developers <numpy-dev@numpy.org>
Copyright (C) 2001-2008 the LGPL VGABios developers Team
Copyright: The ALSA developers
Copyright: The Pidgin developers
Copyright (C) 2001, 2002 the LGPL VGABios developers Team.
Copyright (C) 2001, 2002 the LGPL VGABios developers Team.
Copyright (C) 2001, 2002 the LGPL VGABios developers Team.
Copyright (C) 2001, 2002 the LGPL VGABios developers Team.


-- 
Antonio Terceiro <terceiro@debian.org>

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