Gioele Barabucci <[email protected]> writes: > On 12/02/26 19:45, Russ Allbery wrote:
>> 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. > _A_ date. :) The starting date will still be there if you don't update it > every year. > I don't believe anybody is suggesting removing all dates from the > copyright statements in `d/copyright`, just stopping updating the date > every year. Oh, sure, you can just not update the date and it's still a valid copyright notice. I know some projects that do that. I'm sorry, I misunderstood what you were advocating since Daniel's blog post advocates removing the date entirely. > But what we are discussing here is the copyright on the packaging. From > what I've seen, few packages change their `debian/` files in a > non-trivial way after the initial packaging. And definitely not every > year. "Non-trivial" is another one of those things that has no strict definition in copyright law. :) I would argue that most of the debian/changelog entries that I read involve non-trivial (in the legal sense) creativity. Not the change *described* by the changelog entry, to be clear: the actual words of the changelog entry itself. There are a whole lot of expressive choices being made there! There is approximately no chance anyone would ever file a lawsuit about a copyright violation of the changelog text, of course, but the bar for creative expression in copyright law is not really that high as I understand it. Certainly this mail message satisfies it. But also I'm not a lawyer, so this falls under the general rule that you should ignore what non-lawyers say about this, including me. > I don't believe the FSF would advise to bump the copyright year for _my_ > packaging files if the files written _by the upstream developers_ have > changed. Correct, I don't think they would consider that part of the same package. -- Russ Allbery ([email protected]) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
