Hi Jilayne,

 

my comments are inline.

 

Ciao

Oliver

Von: spdx-legal-bounces@... [mailto:spdx-legal-bounces@...] Im Auftrag von J Lovejoy
Gesendet: Mittwoch, 6. Januar 2016 19:24
An: SPDX-legal
Betreff: copyright notice, and what else?

 

Hi All,

 

Sam and I were discussing what to include (in the context of an SPDX document or generally for compliance with OSS used in a product) in terms of copyright notices and other “related” text one may find with a copyright notice.  For example, if you came across the following, would you provide the second line?

 

       # Copyright (C) 2004, 2005, 2007, 2008 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

       # Written by Gary V. Vaughan, 2004\n",

 

In terms of the SPDX specification, the relevant parts of two sections on copyright notice (package and file sections) state:

 

                Identify the copyright holders of the package, as well as any dates present. This will be a free form text field extracted from 

                package information files. The options to populate               this field are limited to:

                               (i) any text related to a copyright notice, even if not complete; 

 

 

If we take that literally, I’d say only the actual copyright holders is required (the first line), but one could interpret “any text related to a copyright notice” to include the second line.

 

[Oliver] Why do you think that only the first line is required? Mr Vaughan can also hold copyright on this piece of software or do you know that he does not hold any copyright on the software? In Germany we do not have any “required legal” format to indicate copyright ownership. Due to this the statement  “# Written by Gary V. Vaughan, 2004\n" can be a valid indication of copyright ownership (at least in Germany).

 

If we are talking about license compliance, then we'd defer to the license. Although even then, we may be take either a thorough or minimal stance.  What I mean is that if the license requires reproducing the copyright notice, then we end up with the same question as above; the second line arguably isn’t part of the copyright notice (strict interpretation), but one may still decide to include it.  In any case, I don’t think including or not including the second line would hurt or help either way. 

 

[Oliver] see above. Of course others may have a different opinion.

 

If the license does not require the copyright notice explicitly for a binary redistribution (not all do), it still may not change the question.  I’d argue that good practice would be to collect and provide the copyright notice anyway, in which case, we are back to whether or not to also include the second line.  

 

I’d be curious to hear:

1) what other people think and do in practice

 

[Oliver] I would also “print” the second line, if I have found it.

 

 

 

2) consider whether we want to clarify the wording in the specification in any way to be explicitly strict as to what should be included in that field or intentionally leave it to be interpreted with some discretion (for examples such as this).

 

[Oliver] If you restrict the “scope” to statements with “ Copyright (C)” or “©” or similar things, you will be to restrictive and thus the standard will not be useable. In Germany you even can express our ownership like “Die Rechte an der Software gehören Oliver Fendt”, you see the “problem”?

 

Ciao

Oliver

 

 

 

 

Cheers,

Jilayne

 

 

 

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