Walter Landry <[email protected]> writes: > Peter Pentchev <[email protected]> writes:
>> So IMHO there are both good and bad things in copyright notices that >> do not include years: >> - good thing: you don't need to update it each year, and it does not >> get very, very long as you skip a year every now and then :) >> - bad thing: it seems that, at least in the United States, such >> a copyright notice may not be recognized in court > Copyright attaches even if you do not have a copyright notice. A year > makes it more clear when it applies, so enforcement gets easier if you > can point to it. In US law specifically, you have to have a copyright notice to claim statutory damages, which in practice often means that claiming damages is effectively impossible without a copyright notice. (My understanding is that you would then have to prove actual harm, which is expensive and difficult.) But there is no legal requirement to have a copyright notice, and upstream is entitled to not have one if they don't want to have one. That's not something Debian gets to decide for upstream. I think our obligation under the license (and just in general as good citizens) is to reproduce whatever notice upstream uses, even if it's not a legal copyright notice under US law. If upstream doesn't use such a notice, or omits some customary part of it like the years, I'm kind of dubious about us inventing one, and I'm not sure what would require us to do so. -- Russ Allbery ([email protected]) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
