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>>>>> On Mon, 11 Jun 2018, Ulrich Mueller wrote: |
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> [...] Explicitly listing only one copyright holder in the copyright |
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> line looks like the simplest possible solution. Listing nobody would |
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> be even simpler, but I think that you cannot have a copyright line |
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> without at least one entity. |
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Actually, the simplest solution would be not to have any copyright |
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notice at all. It it optional, and copyright protection still holds |
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without it. |
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> Also note that the exercise is _not_ about giving credit to authors |
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> (and we currently don't do that with the Foundation copyright |
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> either). The purpose of the copyright notice is to make a statement |
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> that the work is copyrighted, in order to defeat a possible defense |
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> of "innocent infringement". |
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The following was brought up by rich0 in #gentoo-council: Do we care |
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about the "innocent infringement" defense? That is, would we actually |
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sue anybody to obtain "statutory damages" for past infringements of |
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our copyright, or would our goal be to bring them into compliance in |
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the future? |
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If it is only the latter, we may well omit the copyright line from |
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ebuilds, and keep only the GPL-2 license notice. That would save us |
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all the hassle of keeping track of the main contributor. (Of course, |
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we would have to determine the main contributors when we were to |
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pursue an infringement. But presumably, we would have to verify the |
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accuracy of the copyright line in any case.) |
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Disclaimer: IANAL, TINLA. |
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Ulrich |
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