On Wed, Jan 17, 2007 at 07:06:42PM +0530, Kamesh Jayachandran wrote:
> Malcolm Rowe wrote:
> >I'm fairly sure that fixing a typo isn't a significant enough change
> >to create a new derived work (which is why we'd list a range of
> >copyright years in the first place).
> >
> I could not understand you. Do you mean not to bump the copyright year
> for the typo changes if applicable?
>
Correct, we shouldn't bump the copyright year for a change this simple.
The reason we list copyright years at all is so that we can record when
the work was first published (and therefore when the copyright expires).
When we make changes to a work, the changes may or may not be protectable
under copyright themselves: if they are, we have created a derived work
and gain copyright protection for part of it from the date of the change's
first publication.
Obviously, we can't just bump the copyright year without making _any_
changes to the work, since that would allow us to extend copyright
infinitely. But we also can't just make a trivial change and bump the
year, since we could then achieve the same thing by trivial means.
So when we bump the copyright years, we should only do so if we've added
something that's worthy of copyright protection. And while that's
a difficult thing to judge, I'm pretty sure that correcting typos in
comments isn't.
ObDisclaimer: IANAL. This is not legal advice.
Regards,
Malcolm
- application/pgp-signature attachment: stored
Received on Wed Jan 17 15:10:13 2007