>>>>> On Thu, 15 Nov 2018, William Hubbs wrote:

> On Thu, Nov 15, 2018 at 06:50:52PM +0100, Ulrich Mueller wrote:
>> | * Notice identifies the copyright owner at the time the work was
>> |   first published for parties seeking permission to use the work.
>> | * Notice identifies the year of first publication, which may be
>> |   used to determine the term of copyright protection in the case of
>> |   an anonymous work, a pseudonymous work, or a work made for hire.
>> | * Notice may prevent the work from becoming an orphan work by
>> |   identifying the copyright owner and specifying the term of the
>> |   copyright.
>> 
>> For "indentifying the copyright owner" nothing short of a complete
>> list will suffice. Especially, a notice like the following (which
>> mentions only "Gentoo Authors" and "Sony Interactive Entertainment
>> Inc.") does not help with that at all (i.e., it is no better than the
>> simplified notice):
>> https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo.git/tree/sys-cluster/ceph/ceph-13.2.2-r2.ebuild?id=5f77c21f23bf1c4cfb9e68be7aa27669c8146e8e#n1

> Remember that in the US, SIE is a legal entity, so it can  hold
> copyrights, just like a person can. It is like "Gentoo Foundation,
> Inc."

> So, there would be two contributors in that ebuild: "Gentoo Authors"
> and SIE.

There are many more contributors that aren't listed. Therefore
indentifying the copyright owners is not possible without looking into
the git log. And in practice identifying them won't help much, because
you'd still need their contact information which may be difficult to
obtain. (For example, if we wanted to relicense the tree to GPL-2
*or later*, I'd expect that contacting all contributors or their heirs
would be close to impossible.)

However, I don't say that we should even aim for the above three items
from the copyright office's document. The point is that "Gentoo Authors"
alone is sufficient to protect against the "innocent infringement"
defense, and mentioning any contributor in addition does not add any
value.

Ulrich