[Kde-games-devel] Copyright notices

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Sunday 19 April 2009, Henry Miller wrote:
> > > I.e. replace "(c) 1997, John Doe" with just "1997-2009 The KDEGames
> > > Team" in every game. The Authors tab holds the specifics anyway.

"The KDEGames Team" is not a legal entity, and even if it were it doesn't have 
any claim to your copyrights without a legal assignment properly executed 
(such as we have the FLA for in KDE e.V.)

moreover, you must use the full word "Copyright" for it to hold water. the 
three letters "(c)" are meaningless legally and the actual copyright symbol is 
ok but still doesn't hold the unambiguous universality of using the English 
word "Copyright".

> > If you want to do this then I'd write
> >
> >   Copyright 1997-2009 The authors of <name of application> (see Authors)
>
> Last time I talked to a lawyer about this (about 10 years ago) I was told
> that each year needs to be listed separately.   The 1997-2009 form doesn't
> provide as much protection.  (why I don't understand).  Doesn't KDE have a
> legal team that can discuss this and bring results back?

yes, we do, but is it really required?

	http://techbase.kde.org/Policies/Licensing_Policy
	http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl-howto.html

brief summary: each year you worked on it (not released, worked on it) should 
be listed, use the literal English word Copyright, and list the people's names 
in the files in question.

(AUTHORS files are pretty dubious; they need to be more than an amorphous list 
of names: they need to indicate who worked on what and when; just stick with 
in-file attribution for any non-trivial contribution)

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

KDE core developer sponsored by Qt Software

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