Package: lintian Version: 2.5.96 Severity: normal The test for the human-readable rather than legal text of the Creative Commons licenses seems to fail, because the preamble about Creative Commons not being a law firm is not part of the license text, and neither is the postamble about Creative Commons not being a party to the license agreement; they are instead form the terms and conditions between Creative Commons and the person using a CC license. So I cannot see why these parts should necessarily be included in the Debian copyright file. Has there been a policy decision to require this, perhaps?
Also, it seems that this check would be better in the parse_license function when checking each license block rather than the run function, as there might be more than one CC license in a copyright file, and it is feasible that one is correct and one not. Best wishes, Julian -- System Information: Debian Release: buster/sid APT prefers stretch APT policy: (500, 'stretch'), (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Foreign Architectures: i386 Kernel: Linux 4.14.0-3-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores) Locale: LANG=en_GB.utf8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8) (ignored: LC_ALL set to en_GB.UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_GB.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8) (ignored: LC_ALL set to en_GB.UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system) LSM: AppArmor: enabled Versions of packages lintian depends on: ii binutils 2.31.1-2 ii bzip2 1.0.6-8.1 ii diffstat 1.61-1+b1 ii dpkg 1.19.0.5+b1 ii file 1:5.34-2 ii gettext 0.19.8.1-6+b1 ii intltool-debian 0.35.0+20060710.4 ii libapt-pkg-perl 0.1.34 ii libarchive-zip-perl 1.60-1 ii libclass-accessor-perl 0.51-1 ii libclone-perl 0.39-1 ii libdpkg-perl 1.19.0.5 ii libemail-valid-perl 1.202-1 ii libfile-basedir-perl 0.08-1 ii libipc-run-perl 20180523.0-1 ii liblist-moreutils-perl 0.416-1+b3 ii libparse-debianchangelog-perl 1.2.0-12 ii libtext-levenshtein-perl 0.13-1 ii libtimedate-perl 2.3000-2 ii liburi-perl 1.74-1 ii libxml-simple-perl 2.25-1 ii libyaml-libyaml-perl 0.72+repack-1 ii man-db 2.8.4-2 ii patchutils 0.3.4-2 ii perl [libdigest-sha-perl] 5.26.2-7 ii t1utils 1.41-2 ii xz-utils 5.2.2-1.3 Versions of packages lintian recommends: ii libperlio-gzip-perl 0.19-1+b4 Versions of packages lintian suggests: pn binutils-multiarch <none> ii dpkg-dev 1.19.0.5 ii libhtml-parser-perl 3.72-3+b2 ii libtext-template-perl 1.53-1 -- no debconf information