Hi Ingo, At 2025-10-21T22:39:27+0200, Ingo Schwarze wrote: > G. Branden Robinson wrote on Tue, Oct 21, 2025 at 02:14:29PM -0400: > > > Ratchet back the copyright year range, since no "legally > > significant" [ibid.] changes have been made to the file since > > 2021. > > > > (A question arises in my mind: if 15+ additive lines of "legally > > significant" change accumulate over a period of multiple years, > > which years, if any, should be added to the copyright notice?) > > IANAL, but as far as i understand Copyright, the purpose of listing > the years is making it easier to figure out when the economic rights > on parts of the file in question expire, which is typically some > number of years after the death of the author or after creation or > publication (the numbers increasing directly proportional to Disney).
Right. I'm not a lawyer either, but I have worked with some in software licensing compliance. That doesn't make me competent to practice law, but I've observed the reasoning and practices of informed decision makers in this area. (I'm pleased to note that the reputation of _Nimmer on Copyright_ has declined from the lofty heights of "unquestionable authority" that it enjoyed circa 2000, when copyright expansionists were cruising from one legislative success--and excess--to another.) [reasonable proposal snipped] > Does that make sense to you? It seems potentially workable to me. I'm not yet ready to pitch a reform to GNU copyright policy (apart from dropping the superfluous '(C)' trigraph). I'm still exploring the parameters and consequences of the existing, documented policy. If that policy seems to militate for difficult, unworkable, or absurd outcomes, then that's a feature, not a bug--for evidence-gathering purposes. But, in the meantime, a simpler, alternative approach occurs to me. Since, as you note, for natural persons, the clock on copyright expiry doesn't start running until death anyway, we could just quit attaching years to their copyright notices in the first place. The fact of, and to only a slightly lesser extent, the calendar year of a person's death is in almost every case better documented and more easily decided than when slowly aggregating small-scale changes become "original". Further, since the timer on natural persons' copyrights runs for _decades_ following death, there is plenty of time to locate an obituary or other documentation and to decide the boundaries of their copyrightable work. The foregoing is no help for the FSF, which under current law needs to start worrying about currently copyrighted bits of GNU Emacs falling into the public domain in about 2078. One thing I _don't_ like about my foregoing proposal is that it presumes the futility of copyright duration reform.[1] Regards, Branden [1] https://existentialcomics.com/comic/19
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