The GNU maintainers documentation says:
Ah, yes, you're right, sorry. I was thinking of the paragraph I added
to gpl-howto.html on the web site:
<p>Always use the English word “Copyright”; by international
convention, this is used worldwide, even for material in other
languages. The copyright symbol “©” can be included if
you wish (and your character set supports it), but it's not necessary.
There is no legal significance to using the three-character sequence
“(C)”, although it does no harm.</p>
It might be nice to adjust this wording to
facilitate future conversations like this one.
It definitely would be nice, and I've contemplated doing so from time to
time, but it never seemed like a big enough deal with which to occupy
rms's time discussing.
So, the consensus is that we should make (C) completely optional?
That is the reality. There are a lot of files without the (C), and even
more files with the (C).
little worried that this increases the changes of update-copyright
matching incorrect text.
As long as Copyright is the first word on the line, and it's followed by
at least one four-digit number, a false positive doesn't seem likely to
me. But what do I know.
