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

[Paul Eggert]

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?