On Wed, 2020-03-11 at 16:56 +0100, Thomas Schmitt wrote: > Hi, > > adrian15 wrote: > > Some years ago the FSF advised against using Copyright YEAR1-YEAR- > > 4. > > I don't remember what their reasoning was but it was some legal > > stuff. > > Not sure if it's valid nowadays. > > No reasoning given, but still in the GNU maintainers information. > https://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/html_node/Copyright-Notices.html > > "You can use a range (‘2008-2010’) instead of listing individual > years > (‘2008, 2009, 2010’) if and only if: 1) every year in the range, > inclusive, really is a “copyrightable” year that would be listed > individually; and 2) you make an explicit statement in a README > file > about this usage." > > In a german law court i would argue that "2007-2020" is clear enough > as > information that i worked on the code during that time span, but not > necessarily every year. I see few risk that the other side could > construe > this as invalid copyright claim. > But in America ...
I'm no lawyer but afaik such copyright lines only act as **helpful hints** for people some decades in the future to understand approximately when these works (with each unique version of a file being a new work) might be entering the public domain and thus can be used without obeying licensing terms. Copyright is automatic after all, requiring no such notices to be actually be made for copyright to be enforced. We tend to leave hints about when older copies were published (hence the range, or comma separated / multi line dates) to helpful point out that portions of the work or older variations that might be of interest were available if the copy being looked at is not yet itself. We also keep entries for past copyright holders whose work has been built upon per terms of their licensing (or otherwise for politeness at least). I could not imagine that if a significant mistake were made in a copyright notice that vultures could just seize upon that. It would surely be considered unreliable info and expected that anyone wanting to use a work as public domain would need to put in a reasonable amount of effort to discover an accurate public domain entry date for the piece of work they are interested in using, for instance going to the public source repo and looking at its history. Imagine a misprint of copyright date in a book or a film. Do you see anyone really being able to get away with abusing such a misprint? With code, it is much more likely that a typo could be made or the information could become out of date than in the case of a properly published book, which just speaks to how unlikely it would be that anyone could justify that they truly believed that looking at the date in such a file was truly sufficient to be confident that it was public domain should the date suggest such.
