Re: Copyright assignement for Debian tools?
Antonio Terceiro <terceiro@debian.org> writes:
> 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?
*All* copyright statements are close to legally meaningless. The only
truly important thing that one has to do with copyright statements in
Debian is to retain them as required by the license. (Many licenses
explicitly require that you retain the copyright notice.) We also ask
that people copy them into debian/copyright so that we have clear
documentation of who upstream claims are the copyright holders.
In all countries that are signatories of Berne (which is essentially all
of them), no copyright notice is required and copyright is held by the
author (or the person who contracts the work for hire) regardless of any
copyright notice. The only purpose that copyright notices are permitted
to serve under the Berne convention is that they can affect damages in the
event of a lawsuit. In the event of a lawsuit, I suspect that a judge
would take a look at whether the copyright notice was clear for that
purpose. (In the US, the primary legal purpose the copyright notice
serves is to pre-empt a defense of innocent infringement.)
See http://uscode.house.gov/download/pls/17C4.txt for all the gory details
in the US. Each other country probably has its own version of the law,
and they're probably all at least slightly different (sometimes
significantly different in countries with a stronger moral rights
doctrine than the United States).
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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