Re: [gentoo-project] rfc: copyright attribution clarifications

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Fri, Nov 23, 2018 at 3:23 PM Sarah White <kuzetsa@poindexter.ovh> wrote:
>
> On 11/23/18 2:46 PM, Rich Freeman wrote:
> > Nobody is suggesting that multiple copyright owners shouldn't be
> > allowed.  Merely that multiple copyright owners shouldn't be named in
> > the copyright notice.
>
> The interest in removing or discouraging a more verbose,
> explicit copyright notice would suggest the only legitimate
> interest should be assumed to be in "gentoo authors", and
> for no other entity(s) or person(s) need have any stake
> in having a well-structured copyright notice (any format)

I'm not sure what "well-structured" means.

The one-line format IS valid.  If persons A, B, C, and D all own
copyright on a file, as far as copyright law is concerned person D
receives the same benefit whether the notice lists them or not.  They
can sue for infringement even if they aren't listed on the notice, and
the innocent infringement defense is barred if they do, because the
file contains a valid notice.  US law does not require the person
listed in the notice to be the person filing the lawsuit to obtain the
benefit of there being a notice.

Now, arguably there might be non-legal benefits of having more lines
in the notice, such as documenting ownership, or in advertising
yourself.

In the case of documenting ownership IMO it would be FAR more
efficient to do this with some kind of standardized header in git,
ideally one that is both human- and machine-readable.

In the case of advertising...  If somebody is really contributing THAT
much to Gentoo they should probably just ask to be recognized as a
sponsor where you actually can stick logos on websites, advertise
services, get pagerank, and all that stuff.  Is a company name buried
in an ebuild really that important for this purpose?  And if it is
just an odd contributed ebuild, do we really want to turn our ebuilds
into advertising space?

-- 
Rich