[Savannah-hackers-public] [gnu.org #249673] public domain and copyright information

[Dave Turner via RT]

> [sebastian - Tue Aug 16 16:45:41 2005]:
> 
> Hello guys, we've got a problem.
> 
> The notices on top of the source files says:
> 
> "The author disclaims copyright to this source code.  In place of
> a legal notice, here is a blessing:
> 
> May you do good and not evil.
> May you find forgiveness for yourself and forgive others.
> May you share freely, never taking more than you give."
> 
> 
> So we guess the files are public domain.
> 
> But what about the copyright? Do we have to ask the author
> of these files to include copyright information?
>
> http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html says:
> "Being in the public domain is not a license--rather, it means the
> material is not copyrighted and no license is needed."
> Should we conclude that the author doesn't need to mention his name in
> the source files?
>
> <Beuc> PD is free of copyright, but do we want authorship info just in
> case they're legal issues?

First, don't lose the authorship info.  Even if it's not in the file,
save it somewhere.  If the author(s) put their name(s) into the file,
keep it there, not for legal reasons, but because it's polite. If they
didn't put their names in, there's no reason to add them.

 
-- 
-Dave "Novalis" Turner
GPL Compliance Engineer
Free Software Foundation