Date: Wed, 8 Mar 2017 09:49:14 -0800 (PST) From: "Rodney W. Grimes" <freebsd@pdx.rh.CN85.dnsmgr.net> To: Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> Cc: rgrimes@freebsd.org, Hans Petter Selasky <hselasky@freebsd.org>, src-committers <src-committers@freebsd.org>, "svn-src-all@freebsd.org" <svn-src-all@freebsd.org>, "svn-src-head@freebsd.org" <svn-src-head@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: svn commit: r314905 - in head/sys: compat/linuxkpi/common/include/linux compat/linuxkpi/common/src conf modules/linuxkpi Message-ID: <201703081749.v28HnECd001861@pdx.rh.CN85.dnsmgr.net> In-Reply-To: <CANCZdfq3SMTJFrTRu5f7qtB=_q6D3A-4zCgqsxyLcjdQK5vbkg@mail.gmail.com>
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> On Wed, Mar 8, 2017 at 10:05 AM, Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> wrote: > >>> The project's guidance to > >>> committers for the last 20 years is to do a range of copyright dates. > >> The projects guidance has wrongly been changed then, as I have > >> always tried to make sure the A, B, C-D information was applied > >> correctly. I do have a fairly good understanding of copyright law. > >> > >> Can you point to any "published" project guidance on this manner? >=20 > When the guidance was originated, we used > https://www.oppedahl.com/copyrights/ as a guide since I knew Mr > Oppedahl personally and we talked about it at the time. He recommended > that we use ranges, as he does in his FAQ. He said it was the safest > way to not mislead about the copyright dates. Microsoft uses ranges of His FAQ does agree with me that the date is one of the most important parts of a copyright notice, and that it can easily be a pitfall: (Sorry for not wrapping this) The date. The copyright date is perhaps the most important trap for the unw= ary. One of the purposes of the copyright date, under U.S. copyright law, i= s to assist members of the public in identifying works which are so old tha= t the copyrights have expired= . To do this, a member of the public would take the copyright date appearin= g in the notice, add to it the number of years of the copyright term, and t= hereby arrive at a conclusion as to when the copyright would have expired. = In the case of computer softw= are, it is common place for the work to include original matter from many d= ifferent dates including original work dating from any of several different= years. Consider what would happen if the most recent year were the only ye= ar used in the notice. A memb= er of the public would then be led to the conclusion that the entirety of t= he work is protected by copyright starting from that year and ending at the= end of copyright term. But if part of the work dates from a previous year,= then its term expires one ye= ar earlier than the rest of the work. This could mislead members of the pub= lic in the sense that they would incorrectly think that none of the work co= uld be copied until the end of the term that is based on the date in the no= tice, when in fact part of th= e work would have entered the public domain one year earlier than the end o= f that term. There have been court cases where judges have stricken all of = the copyright rights in a work due to such incorrect statements in the copy= right notice.=20 His FAQ does not actually recommend ranges, it only states this is another thing done: Another approach is to put a range of years. For example, if the oldest mat= ter in the work dates from 1991 and if the newest matter dates from 1994, t= he notice might say copyright 1991 to 1994 and the name of the owner. I assert again the problem with a range is that material inside the range may actually be reaching the end of the time a copyright is valid, and to have the public misslead about that is... well.. wrong, and can and has lead to legal consequences. Quuoting your Mr Oppedahl (also appears above ): There have been court cases where judges have stricken all of the copyright rights in a work due to such incorrect statements in the copyright notice. > dates, even when they haven't made changes in every single year. Of > course, talking to a lawyer about this gives one a big "it depends" > and things get fuzzy. The practical implication might be an inability > to enforce the license terms at the end of the 90 years that people > have copyrights for, so as a practical matter he suggested that for > open source a range was the best compromise between an exhaustive list > of years and never updating the notice. >=20 > It is (or at I think it was) in the developers portion of the > handbook, but I can't find it now. It's implicit in style(9) (I made > the changes there). It's come up several times in the past. >=20 > But like I said, please feel free to improve things by getting a > definitive statement that our current range is wrong from the lawyers > and getting their recommended advice. However, this has been SOP for > the last 20 years, so there's many places that would need to be > corrected.... I doubt that's it's a windmill worth tilting at, but > it's your time. I believe there is a 5 year period that these could of been corrected, I am not concerned about that, cant do much about things loss due to poor SOP, I can, and well, tilt this windmill. =20 > Warner --=20 Rod Grimes rgrimes@freebsd.= org
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