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

[M. J. Everitt]

On 15/11/18 18:50, William Hubbs wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 15, 2018 at 06:50:52PM +0100, Ulrich Mueller wrote:
>> | * Notice identifies the copyright owner at the time the work was first
>> |   published for parties seeking permission to use the work.
>> | * Notice identifies the year of first publication, which may be used
>> |   to determine the term of copyright protection in the case of an
>> |   anonymous work, a pseudonymous work, or a work made for hire.
>> | * Notice may prevent the work from becoming an orphan work by
>> |   identifying the copyright owner and specifying the term of the
>> |   copyright.
>>
>> For "indentifying the copyright owner" nothing short of a complete list
>> will suffice. Especially, a notice like the following (which mentions
>> only "Gentoo Authors" and "Sony Interactive Entertainment Inc.") does
>> not help with that at all (i.e., it is no better than the simplified
>> notice):
>> https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo.git/tree/sys-cluster/ceph/ceph-13.2.2-r2.ebuild?id=5f77c21f23bf1c4cfb9e68be7aa27669c8146e8e#n1
> Remember that in the US, SIE is a legal entity, so it can  hold
> copyrights, just like a person can. It is like "Gentoo Foundation, Inc."
>
> So, there would be two contributors in that ebuild: "Gentoo Authors"
> and SIE.
>
>> Besides, these last three items are pretty much moot for a work released
>> under the GPL-2 (which grants "permission to use"), and I think that
>> even you aren't suggesting that we should go for a complete list of
>> contributors.
> You are right, I'm not advocating for a complete list of contributors.
> I'm just advocating for flexability where contributors want it, and SIE
> is one of those contributors that wants it.
>
> William
Could we not simply move copyright notices into the metadata.xml, and not
worry about the ebuild text itself?!