Re: [Savannah-hackers-public] Two question which I have to pass on

[Noah Slater]

On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 02:23:27PM -0700, Bob Proulx wrote:
>   Don't delete old year numbers, though; they are significant since they
>   indicate when older versions might theoretically go into the public
>   domain, if the movie companies don't continue buying laws to further
>   extend copyright.  If you copy a file into the package from some other
>   program, keep the copyright years that come with the file.

I don't buy this argument.

If a software package has a range of years that apply to all files, then from a
legal standpoint, the current year is the only one you can take into account.
You could not take one file from the current release GNU Emacs and claim that it
had gone into the public domain because the first copyright year is listed as
being over X years ago.

The older years are of no use because they apply to older versions of the same
software. Older versions that are not included in the current release, by
definition. There is no part of that software package that could be used with
one of the older copyright years.

If you only use the most recent year for your software package, with each
subsequent release, the only legally useful year is the one that is included
with your package. Going back in time, each package contains the correct
copyright year for this purpose.

As for telling when some bit of software goes into the public domain, I believe
the current GNU rationale is potentially harmful.

At some point in the future, I have downloaded the most recent release of GNU
Emacs and I notice that the first year in the 17 line list of years (this is a
serious issue!) is actually outside of the current copyright limit. So what do I
do? I certainly can't use any of the software in the current release as if it
was public domain. Nope, I have to go through the release archives, guessing
which one might be from that year.  Eventually after some trial an error I will
find a package which lists that year as the most recent year and I can safely
assume that this package is now in the public domain.

If you only ever used the most recent year, what difference would that make? I
would have to do the very same thing! I might wonder to my self if any GNU Emacs
package is in the public domain, and then I have to perform a manual search as I
find the actual release that I can use. This is exactly the same process!

So, not only do I see the current recommendation as buying us nothing, it has
the very strange side-affect of producing copyright statements that could easily
take up an entire terminal screen-full. A huge 17 line list of years!

-- 
Noah Slater, http://tumbolia.org/nslater