Re: [Savannah-hackers-public] [Savannah-cvs] [377] (Valid copyright notices): Add (C) to the line.

[Ineiev]

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.

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