Re: [gentoo-project] rfc: copyright attribution clarifications

[Ulrich Mueller]

>>>>> On Wed, 14 Nov 2018, William Hubbs wrote:

> On Tue, Nov 13, 2018 at 06:17:17PM -0800, Rich Freeman wrote:
>> So, the purpose of allowing specific copyright holders to be named
>> was to cover cases where we're forking foreign code, not to basically
>> introduce a variant on the BSD advertising clause. IMO people who are
>> only willing to contribute FOSS if their name gets put in a prominent
>> location might do better to contribute elsewhere.

+1000

Maybe the policy for the Gentoo repository should just say that, namely
that traditional copyright notices are only allowed for imported foreign
code. Anything committed directly to the repository and any update of an
existing file would be required to carry the simplified "Gentoo Authors"
copyright notice, without any exceptions allowed.

Can someone come up with a good wording for this?

> Do you feel this way about corporations as well? Do you think the
> Linux kernel maintainers should go and rip out all copyright notices
> other than Linus Torvalds and maybe the Linux Foundation?

Why would corporations be different from individual authors? Under the
legislation here, corporations cannot even hold copyright (or rather,
Urheberrecht) of a work.

>> The purpose of a copyright notice is to declare that the file is
>> copyrighted, and that is it.

Exactly.

>> It isn't a comprehensive list of everybody who holds a copyright on
>> the file.
>>
>> It isn't a revision history.
>>
>> There is no need to list various mixes of years and authors.  Just
>> list the first and last year, and whatever copyright holders are
>> necessary.
>>
>> [...]
>>
>> But, if you had to have multiple lines, then just wrap the existing
>> notice.  Don't turn it into some kind of revision history.  Just list
>> one year range and whatever list of entities you feel compelled to
>> list.  That is the proper way to do a notice.

> No sir, it isn't.

> Look anywhere outside the Gentoo tree. For that matter, take the Linux
> kernel, or even in the systemd source, there are several places with
> multiple copyright notices in them.

Are these the only arguments you have?

To say it again, ebuilds have a copyright notice for exactly two
reasons:

- to protect us against the "innocent infringement" defense under
U.S. law, and

- because the GPL-2 requires in section 1 to "appropriately publish
on each copy an appropriate copyright notice".

For both of these, it is irrelevant what the precise contents of the
notice is. If you made a significant contribution to the file, then you
can claim copyright for it, even if there is no copyright notice at all,
of if you aren't mentioned in it.

IANAL, but I think the case for being listed there explicitly is very
weak.

Ulrich