Hi Branden, G. Branden Robinson wrote on Wed, Oct 22, 2025 at 07:38:44PM -0500:
> 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. Indeed, you mentioned before that such evidence-gathering is the point of your current work in that respect. While personally, i would not have chosen to do such an experiment on a living, real-world software package (for fear of being accused of animal cruelty), i do not object to your approach because when i ignore the evidence-gathering aspect, my impression is that every commit you are doing in this context is an improvement, so i'm happy to not whine about the cruel motivation. :-D > 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, Waitwaitwait, while i *think* that is true in *most* countries as far as computer program code is concerned, now the fact that IANAL becomes even more relevant. I'm *not* convinced it is strictly true for all countries. Besides, a free software package may include files where the Copyright does expire some number of years after creation or publication in many countries, for example audiovisual or photographic works, and some kinds of ASCII art (or similar) might perhaps qualify as "applied art", too. Heck, some source code may be so obfucated that some might call it "applied art" (though i have my doubts whether or not a judge in, say, Vanuatu might concur). Oh wait. The (for serious work) notoriously unreliable Wikipedia utters the opinion that in Bahrain, the Copyright duration for computer software might be "40 years from publication or 50 years from completion, whichever is shorter", whatever "completion" may mean with respect to software. Are you really planning to make life miserable for the poor people of Bahrain? > 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. While this argument sounds reasonable on first sight, i'm not fully convinced even when disregarding Bahrain. Sometimes, a lawsuit may require proof that a specific natural person did indeed write specific parts of the code, and in such cases, having at least a rough first impression who changed the code when may help to speed up the ensuing detective work. Admittedly, not a very strong argument; but still, i think the years add a bit of flesh to the indicative nature of the notices. Besides, there is also the purely moral aspect of giving credit where it is due, even if there should be no legal consideration. I think knowing who changed the code when is often interesting in its own right. Sure, that usually doesn't require particularly high precision, but for example, i think this excerpt from the LICENSE file of the latest mandoc release gives a much better impression of what was really going on than removing the dates would: Copyright (c) 2010-2022 Ingo Schwarze Copyright (c) 2008-2012, 2014 Kristaps Dzonsons Copyright (c) 1999, 2004, 2017 Marc Espie Copyright (c) 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012 Joerg Sonnenberger Copyright (c) 2013 Franco Fichtner Copyright (c) 2014 Baptiste Daroussin Copyright (c) 2016 Ed Maste Copyright (c) 2017 Michael Stapelberg Copyright (c) 2017 Anthony Bentley Copyright (c) 2022 Anna Vyalkova Copyright (c) 1998, 2004, 2010, 2015 Todd C. Miller Copyright (c) 2008, 2017 Otto Moerbeek Copyright (c) 2004 Ted Unangst Copyright (c) 1994 Christos Zoulas Copyright (c) 2003, 2007, 2008, 2014 Jason McIntyre For example, the gradual transfer of maintainership from Kristaps to myself around 2010-2012 immediately stands out, you immediately see that Joerg Sonnenberger was a regular contributor in the early years, that Jason McIntyre has contributed in low intensity, but over a very long time, that Anna Vyalkova contributed one single major patch, and that the contibution of Christos Zoulas resulted from reuse of generic code he published much earlier. All that seems interesting to me. Also pay attention to the license. If the license requires preserving the Copyright notice, then i think correcting factual errors in the Copyright notice is still OK (and, actually, desirable), but whether removing accurate information from a Copyright notice that you are bound to preserve is permissible might be a tricky legal question. I don't rightly know how to judge that particular point... Maybe better safe than sorry? > 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. By that time, those parts may also fall below the rising surface of the oceans, i fear. Again, it depends on the legal system of the particular state, but i fear it's almost certainly true in Vanuatu - and maybe even in some parts of Massachusetts, where, IIUC, the FSF is located. Yours, Ingo
