Re: copyright notice format

[Christian Rose <menthos menthos com>]

ons 2002-12-11 klockan 11.19 skrev Thomas Vander Stichele:
> I think that on pretty much all of the questions we need sound legal 
> advice, not guesswork.

Very much agreed. But there already has been discussions on this on the
gnome-docs list, and with some input from the legal team at Sun
(http://lists.gnome.org/archives/gnome-doc-list/2002-December/msg00006.html).


> I agree that copyright messages should be standardized.
> 
> But ...
> 
> > But the copyright message still often needs translation, since it's not
> > uncommon that the author names need umlauts or other characters not
> > provided with plain ASCII, as Karl Eichwalder already pointed out.
> 
> Is it even useful to translate names ? I mean, does the copyright lose 
> value if the name doesn't have the proper umlaut in place ?

I would guess so. In some languages a character with umlaut is an
entirely different character than the one without, much like W is
entirely different from V in English, although the glyphs resemble each
other. And if legal experts can be nitpicky about (C) versus ©, I can
very well imagine them also being nitpicky about names spelled
incorrectly.


> > Also,
> > variants like:
> > 
> > "Copyright (C) 2002 Foo Bar and many others"
> > "Copyright (C) 2002 Foo Bar and Baz"
> > 
> > etc. need to have those last parts and the "and":s and so on translated.
> 
> Is it really necessary to translate copyright messages AT ALL ?

Yes, I would think so. Our goal should be to make the desktop/user
experience fully translated into the language the user is familiar with
and has chosen, if he or she chooses to. And the about box is a very
prominent part of the user experience. Even Microsoft does translate
and:s and so on in copyright notices in localized versions.

 
> The point of translation, to me, is make the application usable by native 
> speakers.

Surely.


> The copyright message serves a wholly different goal, namely 
> enforcing legal copyright.  I think the two are very different, and I 
> seriously doubt the use of translating these messages at all.

There's no conflict here. Copyright notices are *both* enforcing legal
copyright (although in many countries you don't even need to enforce it
with a notice), and information for the user that the user has to be
able to read. If you want to stay on the ultra-safe side of things and
don't want it translated, make sure yourself that the (C) is replaced by
a ©, and don't include and:s and "and many others" and so on in the
notice, just the years and names with commas. Then it won't need
translation at all.


> For us to decide these things, we need real legal advice that tells us 
> things like
> a) what is the correct way to assert copyright in the source ?
> b) what are the rules in deciding under which country's law the copyright 
> falls ? Ie, if we have code from various nationalities, translated to
> various locales, then what country's rules apply ? The original coder's 
> countries ? THe locale's countries ? A matrix of the two ?

You're welcome to investigate that. Feedback welcome. :)
The point is that many notices used today aren't meeting the
requirements that have already been mentioned, so I don't see why we
should wait with fixing this according to the recommendations of legal
experts that we already have, until we will magically arrive at the
final solution at some undefined point in the future.


> I think that if we are planning on reorganizing this, and making this 
> uniform (a worthwhile goal), we should start by defining what it is we 
> want to achieve instead of only looking at the translator's view of 
> things.

We aren't. Perhaps this hasn't come through, but the different style
variants of the copyright notices aren't just causing trouble for
translators, but also a legal problem since many of these aren't just
following the recommendations in different ways. If those problems are
fixed and the format is standardized, then the number of variants is
automatically reduced. These problems go hand in hand. We aren't just
looking at one side of things, we are looking at both at the same time.


> Personally, I would find it hard to believe that translating (C) to ©
> depending on the target language would ever do us any good in a court room 
> ;)

I'm not a lawyer either, so I also find it hard to believe, but it seems
experts disagree. On the other hand, I don't consider myself an
excellent programmer either, so when the compiler tells me that ";" is
valid but "," isn't at the end of the line, although they look pretty
similar, I usually reluctantly admit that it knows the language better
than I do in the end. ;-)


Christian