Package: lintian Version: 2.5.124 Severity: normal The check "copyright-without-copyright-notice" assumes that upstream has copyright notices to include. Given that copyright notices are not legally required (and copyright subsists in works without such notices), some upstreams avoid including such notices. In such a work, debian/copyright would have no such copyright notice to include.
To forestall an obvious objection, namely "what about a copyright notice for the Debian packaging", the same thing applies to people writing Debian packaging as well. (This lintian issue currently leads me to have a build wrapper script generating debian/copyright, rather than just having a static debian/copyright file checked in.) Thanks, Josh Triplett