On Wed, 2023-02-22 at 07:39 -0700, Sam Hartman wrote: > > > > > > As Jonas mentions, including the years allows people to know when works > enter the public domain and the license becomes more liberal. > I think our users are better served by knowing when the Debian packaging > would enter the public domain.
As far as I know for works from a known author, copyright expires X years after the death of the author. The year of creation or publication isn't useful. Nor are individual years for every year where a change was done (as I think the FSF suggests to document). It is different for anonymous or pseudonymous works where the author is not known, but the author can name himself later (which is fun to find out about: you need to follow the national register for such publications which only exists on paper in Germany[1]). Ansgar [1]: https://www.dpma.de/dpma/wir_ueber_uns/weitere_aufgaben/verwertungsges_urheberrecht/anonyme_werke/index.html