Simon Richter <[email protected]> writes: > Hi, > > On 2/12/26 6:40 PM, Simon Josefsson wrote: > >> My conclusion is that it makes sense for many open source projects to >> avoid the copyright year bump, and equally that it makes sense for many >> free software projects to spend time on doing the copyright year bump. > > From a legal point of view we can only bump the copyright year if a > substantial enough change was made in that year.
I don't think there is any general agreement or policy on that. It is common to suggest that making a new public release is sufficient reason to update the copyright year, even if 99% of the work is identical with the last edition. You will then get another year of copyright protection for that aggregated edition. Searching for "copyright year update for new publication" gives a number of discussions on this (of varied quality). Of course, people will arive at different trade-offs on this, and I think it is hard or impossible to write any general guidelines on this. It depends on the licenses involved and the intent/desires of the copyright holder. /Simon > That is not a problem for cURL, which is actively developed, but it is > less clear-cut if running an automated tool to import a new upstream > version is already clearing the hurdle if no other changes are > required. > > Bumping the copyright year without actually doing something that is > copyrightable would likely weaken a legal case, even if old copyrights > are not expiring soon. > > Simon > >
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