| 1 |
On Thu, Oct 11, 2018 at 5:09 PM Andrew Savchenko <bircoph@g.o> wrote: |
| 2 |
> |
| 3 |
> It does matter, at least in some other countries (non-US). Anyway I |
| 4 |
> doubt that even in US committer has right to change copyright |
| 5 |
> notice without author's approval. |
| 6 |
> |
| 7 |
|
| 8 |
I actually couldn't find any law that explicitly forbids swapping |
| 9 |
names in a copyright notice in the US. It is illegal if you do it to |
| 10 |
conceal copyright infringement, but if you have a license to modify |
| 11 |
the work and redistribute it, and you respect all the licenses/etc, |
| 12 |
then I think the previous author would be hard-pressed to collect |
| 13 |
damages simply for changing a copyright notice in the source code. |
| 14 |
|
| 15 |
They might very well be ticked off about it and create a bunch of bad |
| 16 |
press of course. They certainly could sue you anyway, and since there |
| 17 |
isn't any case law I'm aware of I'm not certain how it would turn out. |
| 18 |
Evidently we live in a world where APIs can be copyrighted, so |
| 19 |
anything is possible. |
| 20 |
|
| 21 |
My thinking with the policy was to allow us to preserve these kinds of |
| 22 |
notices to avoid the issue, but the intent wasn't to keep grafting |
| 23 |
names onto them. |
| 24 |
|
| 25 |
As far as I can tell the Linux source code doesn't have any kind of |
| 26 |
consistent copyright notice use - it seems like whoever first |
| 27 |
contributes any random file picks whatever notice they want and it |
| 28 |
tends to not get touched after that. |
| 29 |
|
| 30 |
IMO copyright notices are somewhat overrated. I always viewed our |
| 31 |
copyrights as being more defensive in nature, though we certainly |
| 32 |
could pursue violators. As such, the notice doesn't really get you a |
| 33 |
whole lot. |
| 34 |
|
| 35 |
-- |
| 36 |
Rich |
Archives