Antonio Terceiro <terce...@debian.org> writes: > There are several cases where upstream explicitly puts "Copyright 2013 > The Foo Developers" and similar statements. Are they invalid as well? If > they are valid, wouldn't "Copyright 2013 Debian Project" have the > similar (if not the same) meaning?
*All* copyright statements are close to legally meaningless. The only truly important thing that one has to do with copyright statements in Debian is to retain them as required by the license. (Many licenses explicitly require that you retain the copyright notice.) We also ask that people copy them into debian/copyright so that we have clear documentation of who upstream claims are the copyright holders. In all countries that are signatories of Berne (which is essentially all of them), no copyright notice is required and copyright is held by the author (or the person who contracts the work for hire) regardless of any copyright notice. The only purpose that copyright notices are permitted to serve under the Berne convention is that they can affect damages in the event of a lawsuit. In the event of a lawsuit, I suspect that a judge would take a look at whether the copyright notice was clear for that purpose. (In the US, the primary legal purpose the copyright notice serves is to pre-empt a defense of innocent infringement.) See http://uscode.house.gov/download/pls/17C4.txt for all the gory details in the US. Each other country probably has its own version of the law, and they're probably all at least slightly different (sometimes significantly different in countries with a stronger moral rights doctrine than the United States). -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/877gme90n7....@windlord.stanford.edu
