To follow up (even more emphatically) Bob's reply:
- `Copyright _year1_, _year2_, _year3_ _copyright-holder_`
+ `Copyright (C) _year1_, _year2_, _year3_ _copyright-holder_`
The ASCII (C) is neither forbidden nor required; it is irrelevant,
legally. What counts is the English word "Copyright" (or the
c-in-a-circle character, but that should not be used since it can cause
unnecessary encoding hassles). It is possible that courts might
recognize ASCII "(C)" as an alternative representation of c-in-a-circle,
but to the best of my knowledge this has never been tested, so best to
avoid it, since there is no loss in doing so.
I looked this up at the Library of Congress web site years
ago. Copyright notices without a "(C)" are widespread, and totally
fine. And shorter.
I don't think we should imply that "(C)" is meaningful. IMHO. -k
P.S. The maintainers file is written as it is because every single
(semantic) change of words must be approved by rms. Therefore when I
proposed or passed on changes I did my utmost to minimize the changes he
had to look at. That often meant ending up with wording that is
different than it would have been had it been written from scratch.
--
