Re: copyright dates in binutils (and includes/)

Joel Brobecker
2014-02-28T13:08:50Z

> Joseph, do you know why implicitly adding years to the claimed
> copyright years is a problem? I'm guessing the file needs to be
> published somewhere for each year claimed.

IANAL, but from 2 discussions with copyright-clerk:

1. We start claiming copyright the year the file as committed
to a medium (hard drive), not the year it was published.

2. As long as we have evidence of a copyrightable change each year,
we can include that year in the list of copyright years in
all files' headers.

For (2), this is how I asked the FSF:

> My question is: As we have evidence of copyrightable changes to the
> GDB project every year since 1986, is it acceptable fix the copyright
> headers to add the missing holes? And if yes, is it acceptable to go
> straight to the next step, which is reducing the copyright years to
> a single range, even if the original list had holes in it? (we will
> make sure that the first year of the range is always 1986 or later,
> or else investigate to make sure that the range is correct).
>
> For example, we would reduce:
>
> > Copyright (C) 1986, 1988-1989, 1991-1993, 1999-2000, 2007-2012 Free
> > Software Foundation, Inc.
>
> into:
>
> > 1986-2012 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
>
> Naturally, if the initial year was 1995, then it would be the year
> used as the start of the range!

... to which they answered that it would be acceptable.

Does it mean that the sources needed to be made public that year for
us to be able to claim copyright that year? It did not seem so to me.
But you could ask the FSF (copyright DASH clerk AT fsf DOT org).

--
Joel