Re: copyright dates in binutils (and includes/)

Joseph S. Myers
2014-02-28T18:22:18Z

On Fri, 28 Feb 2014, Joel Brobecker wrote:

> > 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.

I don't think it counts unless the version in question got published at
some point. The question is about versions that weren't published at the
time, but were published later when the version control history was
released.

There was a discussion on bug-standards starting Jan 2012. Karl's revised
wording from 11 May 2012 seems to indicate that if a version was committed
to a version control history that was later released, the dates from that
history count as copyrightable years (so reducing the number of cases
where it may not be possible to fill in gaps) - but that revised wording
doesn't seem to have been committed.

--
Joseph S. Myers
joseph@codesourcery.com