O 21/08/26 ás 20:47, The Wanderer <[email protected]> escribiu:
On 2026-08-21 at 14:13, Russ Allbery wrote:
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.
(For avoidance of doubt, I concur with and/or confirm - as applicable -
all of this.)
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.
I can see one benefit from having years, which isn't really relevant
yet, but could become so in the future:
Unless I'm very much mistaken (which is always possible), the date of a
copyright determines when that copyright will expire, and the
copyrighted material will enter the public domain.
It depends. Under the Berne Convention, copyright protection extends for
the lifetime of the author plus (at minimum) 50 years. Pseudonymous
works do get copyright 50 years after being published, and I guess this
could apply to developers whose usernames can't be traced to real people.
