Re: [PATCH] maint: fix copyright dates that were munged by a maintenance script

[Jim Meyering]

Paul Eggert wrote:
> On 11/08/10 16:25, Karl Berry wrote:
>> I quote the SFLC
>> lawyer (Aaron Williamson) who replied to me most recently about this
>> issue:
>>
>>     More importantly, none of this much matters because *notice is not
>>     required for copyright protection.*
>
> True, if we don't care about collecting statutory damages for files like
> gunzip, but there's a more serious problem: criminal penalties for fraudulent
> copyright notices.  In the worst-case scenario, if I put "Copyright 2010"
> on a hundred files that were actually dated 2007, then I could be fined
> $2500 per file.  See <http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap5.html#506>.
> I'd really rather not put my personal neck on the line even if this is
> just a "theoretical" problem.  (In copyright, sometimes the "theoretical"
> problems come back and bite you. :-)
>
>> The reason why rms wants years in the copyright notices is so people can
>> know when code enters the public domain.
>
> Wow, what a waste of time!  The repositories have that info automatically.
>
> Perhaps the issues of criminal penalties and repositories could help
> us change rms's mind at some point?  We really are wasting a lot of time
> here.
>
>>    # This program is distributed as part of gzip, which is
>>    # Copyright (C) 2010 Free Software Foundation
>>
>> If you want to make that change, go right ahead.
>
> I can easily do that sort of change by hand, but would like to make sure that
> the same issue doesn't come up in 2011 when the script is run again.  Jim,
> what do you think?

However it turns out is fine with me, as long as these pesky
copyright year changes can be minimized to at most
a once-per-year automated task -- and as long as there's no
more unbounded-comment-length problem ;-)