On 1/11/07, Malcolm Rowe <malcolm-svn-org@farside.org.uk> wrote:
> For the Board:
>
> Some boring copyright questions, prompted by [0]. If the Board isn't
> the right entity to deal with these questions, I'm sure they know who
> is.
>
>
> Firstly, could I ask the Board to seek legal advice on:
>
> * whether the form of our current copyright notices is legally correct
> or not (Justin claims not, in e.g. [1, 2])
>
So
1. It's incorrect because it's not copyrighted by collabnet for pieces
not created by collabnet. WE've never assigned copyright.
2. Ignoring that, you are really supposed to list the years out, like
Copyright 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007
Every year there was a change should be listed, since it created a
derivative work that has copyright protection.
Past that, you can argue either way about when to update the notices.
Every lawyer differs on their view about whether it is okay to just
update the notice without any other change. Outside of that, everyone
agrees it is fine to do so in conjunction with another change.
> * at what point we should be making changes to the dates in the notices
> (for both the file level and 'package' level, i.e. the help output),
> and
> - whether it makes any difference if we are talking about a trunk
> release or a branch release (e.g. 1.4.x),
> - whether we have to make a packaged 'release' before we can change
> the notice ('publication'), or whether visibility through e.g.
> ViewVC is considered publication for copyright purposes.
Our source tree is publicly accessible. You are effectively
publishing the code every time you commit a change.
>
> [0] http://svn.haxx.se/dev/archive-2007-01/0021.shtml
> [1] http://svn.haxx.se/dev/archive-2007-01/0046.shtml
> [2] http://svn.haxx.se/dev/archive-2007-01/0049.shtml
>
>
> Secondly, could the Board report on the progress of arranging the
> transfer of the copyright currently held by CollabNet to the Subversion
> Corporation (as I understand that that was the plan), and on any plans
> for arranging for committers to sign CLAs?
This i'd like an update on myself :)
Garrett?
Note: None of the above is legal advice for the subversion
corporation, even though i am a board member. If we want/need
official legal advice on the above issues, we need to contact our
counsel.
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Received on Thu Jan 11 23:50:47 2007