I'm not a lawyer, but the year in a copyright notice is supposed to be the
year of original publication. If you have a document first published in
2012 with a "Copyright 2012" notice and you change the year to 2014 without
making any other changes, the original publication year is still 2012 but
now the copyright notice is incorrect, which makes it legally equivalent to
no notice at all (although copyright notices have little legal meaning
anyway in Berne Convention countries). See here, for example:

  http://www.quizlaw.com/copyrights/what_happens_if_there_is_an_er.php

It makes sense to bump the user-visible copyright notices of lilypond,
convert-ly, and the like to whatever year those tools were last
substantively changed, and to update the notices in individual files to
reflect when they were last changed, but a global search-and-replace is
probably a bad idea.

-- Ben



On Sat, Jan 4, 2014 at 3:50 PM, Carl Sorensen <carl.d.soren...@gmail.com>wrote:

> In response to issue 3765, I ran make grand-replace to update all
> copyright notices to 2014.
>
> It looks like I no longer have push privileges, so I couldn't push the
> patch to staging.
>
> Anyway, here's the patch, if somebody would please push it.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Carl
>
>
>
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> lilypond-devel@gnu.org
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>
>
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