Paul Eggert wrote: > 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?
However it turns out is fine with me, as long as these pesky copyright year changes can be minimized to at most a once-per-year automated task -- and as long as there's no more unbounded-comment-length problem ;-)
