IANAL IANAL IANAL On Mon, Apr 15, 2019 at 03:13:01PM -0600, Karl Berry wrote: > 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).
UCC suggests that valid copyright notices "bear the symbol © " (not "Copyright") "accompanied by the name of the copyright proprietor and the year of first publication" [0], and this is what I'm used to see in books printed locally: © copyright_holder year; in fact, this is the form described in Russian Civil Code. On the other hand, contries like Iran use totally different conventions. [0] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Universal_Copyright_Convention#Article_III > 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 believe (C) is the equivalent of © in ASCII. if I'm going to let people edit my code in reansonably different environments, I think I may want to stick to ASCII when possible. > I looked this up at the Library of Congress web site years > ago. Copyright notices without a "(C)" are widespread, and totally > fine. I agree. I'd accept notices like (assuming the names and years are reasonable): - Copyright © Shakuntala 2018, 2019 - Music Copyright (C) 2007-2017 Johannes Kreisler - Copyright 2002, 2004, 2008 Pippilotta Delicatessa Windowshade Mackrelmint Efraimsdotter Longstocking, Josef Švejk, Beatrice Rasponi - What I would ask to fix: - Copyright Orrec Caspro - (no year) - Copyright provided by Nestan-Darejan - (no year, too informal and probably confused wording) - Copyright 2000-2003 Jean Valjean 2004-2007 Lin Daiyu 2005-2009 Sancho Panza - (no first element in the two last copyright notices, and the lines don't fit in one "copyright notice") - Copyright © 1990-2019 respective authors - (no real information about copyright holders) > 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. I'm still going to recommend the form from the example in maintainers.texi. I consider it a source for our FAQ. if there are inconsistencies, the FAQ should be corrected; the defects should be fixed in the source first.
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature
