Interesting question. First, a perspective point. The copyright notice in the file is primarily for Apache's benefit. It puts people on notice that Apache claims copyright on the material.
Well, first, it really should be:
Copyright [yyyy] The Apache Software Foundation or its licensors, as applicable.
The board has been lax in asking the developers to adopt this new attribution, which is much more appropriate than just saying "Copyright The Apache Software Foundation"; the original contributions remain owned by their contributors, we're simply granted a right to redistribute; we do have a compilation copyright though, as I understand it.
On the other hand, the license (though it does have some benefit to Apache) is primarily for the user's benefit. Without it, the user has no license at all.
So, is the user put at a disadvantage in any way because the license isn't embedded in the JavaDoc? Wouldn't anyone who understands how JavaDoc works know exactly how to find out what license is available for that material?
My sense is that this is splitting hairs a bit and that the full license, or even the reference to it, doesn't need to be included in the javadoc output - just as we don't embed it as a string in compiled code when we distribute binaries. Would someone reasonably be able to claim that they didn't know there was a copyright on that file simply because we didn't put a notice in it? My guess is probably not, or if so, no big deal.
Brian
