Re: [gentoo-dev] Are "Copyright 1999-20xx Gentoo Foundation" headers bogus?

[Mart Raudsepp]

Ühel kenal päeval, N, 27.10.2016 kell 07:21, kirjutas Rich Freeman:
> On Thu, Oct 27, 2016 at 7:00 AM, Mart Raudsepp <leio@g.o>
> wrote:
> >
> >
> > Projects that want explicit copyright or copyright assignments or
> > CLAs
> > are those that want to be able to re-license the code without
> > getting
> > permissions from everyone (some of whom might not be possible to
> > contact at a future date) or be able to sue someone for license
> > violations without the original developers of the affected parts
> > having
> > to be involved. Are we pursuing those option, or why do we care?
>
> These are useful options to have available.  The ability to pursue
> violators would not require 100% signing of FLAs to
> work.  Relicensing
> probably would, or close to it, so that might not ever be practical
> unless FLA acceptance is very widespread.
>
> >
> > We don't need bogus or
> > non-bogus copyright headers, just a "Gentoo project and
> > contributors"
> > copyright notice or optionally allowing explicit ones to those that
> > want it, together with a license notice.
>
> Actually, that isn't allowed, and was the very issue that kicked off
> the entire matter.  You can't just take somebody else's code and
> change the copyright to "Gentoo project and contributors" if the
> Gentoo project's only contribution to the file is changing the
> copyright notice.  From my reading on the topic you generally need to
> list the largest contributor on the copyright line, which may or may
> not be the Gentoo Foundation.

"and contributors" covers that, and I didn't specify "Foundation".
The copyright headers purpose is:

"Contrary to popular belief, providing a copyright notice or
registering the work with the USCO is not necessary to obtain basic
copyright protections. But there are some steps that can be taken to
enhance the creator's ability to sue or stop others from copying:"

Place a copyright notice on a published work. (...) Placing this notice
on a published work (...) prevents others from claiming that they did
not know that the work was covered by copyright. This can be important
if the author is forced to file a lawsuit to enforce the copyright,
since it is much easier to recover significant money damages from a
deliberate (as opposed to innocent) copyright infringer."

The copyright header has NO LEGAL meaning. IANAL.

> > And yes, the headers are currently completely bogus. You can
> > consider
> > it to be as such to any file I have contributed copyrightable work
> > to,
> > and the Gentoo Foundation does not have copyright to such work of
> > mine.
>
> If you don't think your contributions are copyrighted by the Gentoo
> Foundation, you probably shouldn't be putting that statement in the
> files you commit.  I don't see why your commits are any less legally
> binding on you than your statements in emails like the one above.

The copyright header has no meaning on who holds the copyright. The
Gentoo tooling automatically puts these lines or refuses to work. Over
half of the stuff I commit is not copyrightable work in the first
place.
Me committing something with repoman commit (especially during CVS
times even doing a separate commit for this stuff) ending up with some
header doesn't mean I have done any copyright assignment. No court in
my jurisdiction would consider this to be the case. Courts in other
jurisdictions don't even recognize copyright reassignment and some not
even work for hire copyright to the company.

The header is only a tool to lower the chances of someone taking the
work inappropriately. Stop treating it as some kind of law.

> And this is why improving the policy in this space is important.


IANAL,
Mart