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Posted to legal-discuss@apache.org by "Noah Slater (JIRA)" <ji...@apache.org> on 2011/07/19 20:14:57 UTC
[jira] [Created] (LEGAL-94) How to list copyright years
How to list copyright years
---------------------------
Key: LEGAL-94
URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-94
Project: Legal Discuss
Issue Type: Question
Reporter: Noah Slater
This question is in relation to the following commit to the Apache CouchDB project:
http://svn.apache.org/viewvc/couchdb/trunk/NOTICE?r1=1148456&r2=1148455&pathrev=1148456
>From the official policy here:
http://www.apache.org/legal/src-headers.html
We have the following sentence:
"The top of each NOTICE file should include the following text, suitably modified to reflect the product name and year(s) of distribution of the current and past versions of the product"
I would like to seek clarification on this matter.
Firstly, I would argue that from a copyright perspective, you should only put list the most recent date. Because the copyright applies to the work as a whole, each time you update it, you are creating a new work. The is no logical reason to list the copyright dates of previous works, even if they exist as part of a lineage. It could be argued that this information may be useful for people wanting to know when the copyright expires on previous versions, but in this scenario, that person can simply download the older releases and check the copyright information pertinent to that release. Is it acceptable for Apache CouchDB to list only the most recent year in this file for each release?
If it is not, how should one list the previous years? The changeset above uses the "2009-2011" syntax, but this seems ambiguous. While you would hope that an Apache project release at least one a year, there may conceivably be a year when no release is made, which would render this syntax inaccurate. The FSF's policy on this is to list each year a release was made explicitly. But this has the unfortunate side-effect of causing the copyright notice to span many lines as the project matures.
Either way, the wording of the current policy is ambiguous, and I was hoping we could clarify it.
Sorry for being such a stickler for detail.
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[jira] [Commented] (LEGAL-94) How to list copyright years
Posted by "Jukka Zitting (JIRA)" <ji...@apache.org>.
[ https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-94?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=13078796#comment-13078796 ]
Jukka Zitting commented on LEGAL-94:
------------------------------------
See LEGAL-51 for an earlier issue on this. At the time I failed to reach enough consensus on the change I was proposing.
> How to list copyright years
> ---------------------------
>
> Key: LEGAL-94
> URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LEGAL-94
> Project: Legal Discuss
> Issue Type: Question
> Reporter: Noah Slater
>
> This question is in relation to the following commit to the Apache CouchDB project:
> http://svn.apache.org/viewvc/couchdb/trunk/NOTICE?r1=1148456&r2=1148455&pathrev=1148456
> From the official policy here:
> http://www.apache.org/legal/src-headers.html
> We have the following sentence:
> "The top of each NOTICE file should include the following text, suitably modified to reflect the product name and year(s) of distribution of the current and past versions of the product"
> I would like to seek clarification on this matter.
> Firstly, I would argue that from a copyright perspective, you should only put list the most recent date. Because the copyright applies to the work as a whole, each time you update it, you are creating a new work. The is no logical reason to list the copyright dates of previous works, even if they exist as part of a lineage. It could be argued that this information may be useful for people wanting to know when the copyright expires on previous versions, but in this scenario, that person can simply download the older releases and check the copyright information pertinent to that release. Is it acceptable for Apache CouchDB to list only the most recent year in this file for each release?
> If it is not, how should one list the previous years? The changeset above uses the "2009-2011" syntax, but this seems ambiguous. While you would hope that an Apache project release at least one a year, there may conceivably be a year when no release is made, which would render this syntax inaccurate. The FSF's policy on this is to list each year a release was made explicitly. But this has the unfortunate side-effect of causing the copyright notice to span many lines as the project matures.
> Either way, the wording of the current policy is ambiguous, and I was hoping we could clarify it.
> Sorry for being such a stickler for detail.
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