Simon Josefsson <[email protected]> writes: > Simon Richter <[email protected]> writes: >> On 2/12/26 6:40 PM, Simon Josefsson wrote:
>>> My conclusion is that it makes sense for many open source projects to >>> avoid the copyright year bump, and equally that it makes sense for >>> many free software projects to spend time on doing the copyright year >>> bump. As someone pointed out in the comments on Daniel's blog post, US law gives special status to a valid copyright notice, which under US law must contain a date. This doesn't override Berne -- it is not required to claim copyright -- but it avoids innocent infrigement defenses in copyright lawsuits in US courts. See https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ03.pdf under "Advantges to Using a Copyright Notice." Individual maintainers may of course reasonably decide that this is irrelevant to them because they're never going to sue for copyright violation in US courts anyway, but I think it's worth knowing that removing the dates does have a legal downside. >> From a legal point of view we can only bump the copyright year if a >> substantial enough change was made in that year. > I don't think there is any general agreement or policy on that. The advice of the Free Software Foundation, which I believe they ran past their lawyers, requires a non-trivial change but only to any part of the package. It doesn't have to be a non-trivial change to that specific file. >From the FSF documentation: To update the list of year numbers, add each year in which you have made nontrivial changes to the package. (Here we assume you’re using a publicly accessible revision control server, so that every revision installed is also immediately and automatically published.) When you add the new year, it is not required to keep track of which files have seen significant changes in the new year and which have not. It is recommended and simpler to add the new year to all files in the package, and be done with it for the rest of the year. > Searching for "copyright year update for new publication" gives a number > of discussions on this (of varied quality). This is one of those topics where I ignore all advice unless I have reason to believe that it's been vetted by a lawyer. There are a lot of people with amateur opinions about law, myself included, and copyright law is a confusing disaster that is easy to be confidently wrong about. -- Russ Allbery ([email protected]) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
