Re: copyright dates in binutils (and includes/)

["Joseph S. Myers" <joseph@codesourcery.com>]

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