Re: Licence of commit-block-joke.py, ...etc...

[Garance A Drosihn]
> I am pretty sure that copyright law does not allow that. The
> copyright notice has to be in the material which has that copyright.

Not in the United States, at least. You don't have to put a copyright
notice on your work to receive copyright protection. I think the
reason to put a notice in each file is really for the copyright
_license_ notice, which, if it weren't there, you wouldn't necessarily
be able to assume. Because, while copyright protection attaches
automatically by law, a grant of license does not.

But this does bring up a question of why these things should always
have to have file-level granularity. I don't usually see copyright
notices on each page of a book, or even each chapter. You could argue
that each file can be downloaded separately, via the svn repository,
but by that argument you could also download only the last half of a
file, if you really wanted.

What's needed is merely a way to _know_ what copyright license is
granted in all cases. It's just that declaring this per-file is the
best way to do that in an open source environment where lots of parties
have copyright interest, and individual files are sometimes copied from
one project to another.

-- 
Peter Samuelson | org-tld!p12n!peter | http://p12n.org/
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