Re: [License-discuss] MIT-Clone: Copyright notice

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Jasper Horn (jasperh...@gmail.com):

> What do you people think about this?

Since you ask:  IMO, the optimal solution to your problem is to cease
obsessing over MIT License copyright notices -- which are in the short term 
doing no harm and over the long term will tend to do positive good (by 
furnishing recipients the names of legal stakeholders who, at least as
of a particular (specified: see below) date, owned a copyright encumbrance).  

One of the recurring trends in recent years on OSI license-discuss has
involved people deciding they dislike copyright notices for short
permissive licences, pointing out that copyright law doesn't require
them (true), and for various IMO bad reasons seeking to drop them.  I
recognise that said school of thought exists; I don't think it should be
encouraged.

And, by the way, although nothing in copyright law requires you to use
the formulation 'Copyright 2020 Joe Coder' and prevents you from saying
'Created in 2020 by Joe Coder', your avoidance of the word 'copyright' 
has no effect on the legal reality of title arising and vesting
instantaneously whenever someone puts a creative work in one of the
covered categories, or an improvement to such a work, into fixed form.
So, the reason you should continue to call a copyright notice a
copyright notice rather than an attribution notice is that the former is 
_what it really is_.

So, I'd really strongly suggest that you appreciate the merits of MIT
Licence exactly the way it is, and not seek to create a semi-clone with
unwise modifications made for unwise reasons.

-- 
Cheers, "Why doesn't anyone invite copyeditors to parties,
Rick Moen   when we're such cool people out with whom to hang?"
r...@linuxmafia.com-- @laureneoneal (Lauren O'Neal)
McQ! (4x80)

___
License-discuss mailing list
License-discuss@lists.opensource.org
http://lists.opensource.org/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org

Re: [License-discuss] MIT-Clone: Copyright notice

[Gil Yehuda via License-discuss]

I bet when copyright was first created, the working assumption is that a
work is a relatively static thing. Software is not. And this brings up the Ship
of Theseus  problem (Take a
ship, replace all the boards. at what point is it no longer the same ship?
-- or if you replace the code in my project with your code, when it is no
longer my project?)

I recommend reading A THEORY OF JOINT AUTHORSHIP FOR FREE AND OPEN SOURCE
SOFTWARE PROJECTS  by Pamela
Chestek (an active member of this list), since she gives a really
interesting account of how we could be thinking about this issue.

Some projects use a generic construction "The FooProject Authors"
Copyright {{.Year}} the {{.ProjectName}} Authors

But US copyright law explains:

the name of the owner of copyright in the work, or an abbreviation by which
the name can be recognized, or a generally known alternative designation of
the owner.

and 'The FooProject Authors' is not a generally known designation of the
owner. Well, maybe it is. I'm not a lawyer. But I'm with you in not really
knowing the best way to describe the fluid nature of this thing.

As a practical matter, I ran into a situation last week where a team was
fighting about the code -- some members felt that one engineer was taking
their code and using it in ways that were not consistent with their wishes.
At the root of the problem was the concept "their code" since this was a
team effort.

Gil Yehuda: I help with external technology engagement

>From the Open Source Program Office
 at Verizon Media

On Fri, Feb 14, 2020 at 7:14 AM Lukas Atkinson 
wrote:

> Yet, this cannot be fixed because the license prohibits it.
>>
>
> While the MIT license stipulates that “the above copyright notice” shall
> be included, I see nothing that prevents the copyright notice from being
> amended to list additional copyright holders. It seems to be common
> practice to add another line below the original notice.
>
> It is my (amateur) understanding that copyright notices have very little
> use nowadays since copyright is automatic – it does not have to be asserted
> explicitly. So getting rid* of copyright notices would not be fatal. But
> their remaining use is non-zero, e.g. if jurisdictions have laws against
> falsification of copyright notices or tie some aspects of copyright
> enforceability to the existence of a notice. A license that actively
> discourages copyright notices would be questionable.
>
> * with “getting rid” in the sense of “not writing new notices”. Existing
> notices must be kept.
> ___
> License-discuss mailing list
> License-discuss@lists.opensource.org
>
> http://lists.opensource.org/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org
>
___
License-discuss mailing list
License-discuss@lists.opensource.org
http://lists.opensource.org/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org

Re: [License-discuss] MIT-Clone: Copyright notice

[Lukas Atkinson]

>
> Yet, this cannot be fixed because the license prohibits it.
>

While the MIT license stipulates that “the above copyright notice” shall be
included, I see nothing that prevents the copyright notice from being
amended to list additional copyright holders. It seems to be common
practice to add another line below the original notice.

It is my (amateur) understanding that copyright notices have very little
use nowadays since copyright is automatic – it does not have to be asserted
explicitly. So getting rid* of copyright notices would not be fatal. But
their remaining use is non-zero, e.g. if jurisdictions have laws against
falsification of copyright notices or tie some aspects of copyright
enforceability to the existence of a notice. A license that actively
discourages copyright notices would be questionable.

* with “getting rid” in the sense of “not writing new notices”. Existing
notices must be kept.
___
License-discuss mailing list
License-discuss@lists.opensource.org
http://lists.opensource.org/mailman/listinfo/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org