> Actually, this is a good point. While the FSF may declare that all > patches after Aug 1 are GPLv3, unless they take affirmative action > to assert the copyright and license, courts may determine that they > waive rights under these. Especially if a reasonable person would > expect copyright statements to be correct.
Note that the issue, in practice, isn't what the FSF distributes but what a third party (RedHat, Apple, AdaCore, etc) distributes. In such a case, the recipient can't rely on ANY statements of copyright status in the files for ANY purpose. For all they know, there's some (e.g.) Sun-copyrighted code in there that was put there by the careless action of the third-party. What needs to happen in such a case is that the third-party warrants to the people they distribute to that the copyright and license are as they claim and indemnifies the recipient against any claim to the contrary. In order to do that, the third party has to be quite sure of what the story is!
