Re: [gentoo-project] [RFC] GLEP 76: Copyright Policy

[William Hubbs]

On Wed, Jun 13, 2018 at 10:35:00PM +0200, Ulrich Mueller wrote:
> >>>>> On Mon, 11 Jun 2018, Ulrich Mueller wrote:
>
> > [...] Explicitly listing only one copyright holder in the copyright
> > line looks like the simplest possible solution. Listing nobody would
> > be even simpler, but I think that you cannot have a copyright line
> > without at least one entity.
>
> Actually, the simplest solution would be not to have any copyright
> notice at all. It it optional, and copyright protection still holds
> without it.

I was checking into this yesterday, and yes this is true. I would
personally be fine with not requiring copyright notices.

> > Also note that the exercise is _not_ about giving credit to authors
> > (and we currently don't do that with the Foundation copyright
> > either). The purpose of the copyright notice is to make a statement
> > that the work is copyrighted, in order to defeat a possible defense
> > of "innocent infringement".
>
> The following was brought up by rich0 in #gentoo-council: Do we care
> about the "innocent infringement" defense? That is, would we actually
> sue anybody to obtain "statutory damages" for past infringements of
> our copyright, or would our goal be to bring them into compliance in
> the future?
>
> If it is only the latter, we may well omit the copyright line from
> ebuilds, and keep only the GPL-2 license notice. That would save us
> all the hassle of keeping track of the main contributor. (Of course,
> we would have to determine the main contributors when we were to
> pursue an infringement. But presumably, we would have to verify the
> accuracy of the copyright line in any case.)

The contributors can be found via "git log" or "git blame", so it isn't
that hard to determine who they are.

>
> Disclaimer: IANAL, TINLA.
>
> Ulrich

William