Copyright information in headers

[Andrew Wilkins]

On Thu, Sep 4, 2014 at 5:50 AM, Ian Booth <ian.booth at canonical.com> wrote:

> Hi folks
>
> The question recently came up in reviews as to whether we should be
> updating the
> date in the copyright statement in the file header when we make a change
> to the
> code in that file. I sought clarification from Robie Basak, who previously
> had
> provided input on licensing issues and compliance for getting Juju
> included in
> trusty. Below is what he said.
>
> TL;DR;
> It doesn't really matter, we just need to agree on a policy. It is
> suggested
> though that we do update the date when we make a change. Agree?
>
> <snip>
> >
> > What's our policy for dates in copyright headers?
> >
> > // Copyright 2012, 2013 Canonical Ltd.
> > // Licensed under the AGPLv3, see LICENCE file for details.
>
> From the point of view of acceptability for Ubuntu, it doesn't
> particularly matter, and I don't believe it'll cause any issue for us
> whatever you do here. I'll certainly be happy to upload whether or not
> you update the date.
>
> I'll try to explain my perspective on this, but I'm not entirely
> confident that there isn't something I'm missing for the broader
> picture, so note that I Am Not A Lawyer, etc.
>
> > For the above, do we need to add 2014 if we modify the file this year?
> > Or is the date just meant to be the year the file was first published?
>
> I think it's meant to be the sum of all the copyright claims on the
> file. So if you add some new code, you have a copyright claim on the new
> code in the newer year in which you made it.
>
> AIUI, the purpose of the date is that since copyright expires
> (theoretically, anyway), updating the date updates the copyright claim,
> which would give us more control in the (eventual) event that copyright
> expires.
>
> In practice, IMHO this is never going to matter since nobody is going to
> care about the copyright on a piece of software that is that old anyway.
> But I suppose laws could change, so the right thing to do would be to
> add a new year whenever you make a change in a new year on a per-file
> file basis. BTW, it's common to fold "2012, 2013, 2014" to just
> "2012-2014".
>
> But I don't particularly care for upload purposes.
>

Depending on the country, copyright notices require the first year of
publication. I'm not aware of any that *require* the full range, but in
some cases it is recommended to have it on ongoing works as a claim of
authorship.
As Gustavo says, we have this in revision control. We work in the open.
Let's not get distracted with unnecessary work.
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