Re: copyright notice format

[Peter Bowen <pzb ximian com>]

On Sat, 2002-12-07 at 21:30, Christian Neumair wrote:

> Furthermore, (C) is officially recognized as an identifier for copyright.

Where did you see this?  Everything I found states that "Copyright" and
"©" are copyright identifiers, but "(C)" isn't.

> After reading some articles on copyright laws and copyright in general I
> decided to use
>  (C) <first-year-code-was-published> <author>.
> In some products / modules (like gnome-panel) there occur a great many
> copyright strings and the first proposal requires the maintainers to
> change the strings every year which is very annoying because it produces
> new strings for the translators.

Yes, if new code is published, then the copyright must be updated.  The
first year code was published needs to be there, but a single program or
file may contain multiple blocks of copyrighted code written in
different years.  We could have lots of copyright notices like:

Copyright 1999 John Doe.  All rights reserved.
Copyright 2000 John Doe.  All rights reserved.
Copyright 2001 John Doe.  All rights reserved.

but it is generally considered easier to simply say

Copyright 1999, 2000, 2001 John Doe.  All rights reserved.

as it is a single line.  However

Copyright 1999 John Doe

alone is clearly missing copyright information.  Additionally, a single
program or file may have multiple authors who each have copyright on
parts they wrote.  Each author's copyright must be preserved.

Also important is recognizing work that is done independently and work
that is done for hire.  Many GNOME programs have portions that are
copyrighted by companies who paid for development and portions that were
done outside of WFH situations.  Both of these copyrights must be
maintained.  Removing a copyright holder because they weren't the first
author isn't acceptable.

I understand that the translators want to cut down on the number of
distinct strings that must be translated, but legal requirements must
take precedence.

Thanks.
Peter