Re: Copyright notices

[Richard M. Stallman]

    It occurs to me that if there isn't a release until 2006 (or
    later!) then all the files will need to be changed again.  Now
    that the legal advice suggests a straightforward solution perhaps
    this process could (ultimately) be scripted.

It could be so.

    perhaps all files could display the _same_ copyright notice (apart from
    comment delimiters) for the period from the start of Emacs (1985?) to the
    present?

No, because most files were added to Emacs later than 1985, and some of them
have years when they were released by their authors bevore they were added
to Emacs.

A script to add a certain year to all files in a certain directory,
or to the files that are specified for it, would do the job.
Doing this is not quite trivial, but not terribly hard.

Would you like to write it?

    Not only is the year wrong but it seems to suggest that everything before 
2004
    is not copyrighted.

No, it doesn't mean that.  Don't worry.