Is an UNCOPYRIGHTABLE License (or keyword) needed? #poll


michael.kaelbling@...
 

The U.S. Copyright Office considers some works uncopyrightable "because they contain an insufficient amount of authorship", e.g. "words and short phrases ... titles ... names", "mere listing of ... contents, or a simple set of directions...", and  blank forms  (https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ33.pdf). 

SPDX-License-Identifier: NONE and SPDX-CopyrightText: NONE state that there is no license or copyright statement, but do not say that none is needed or possible.

SPDX-License-Identifer: NOASSERTION and SPDX-CopyrightText: NOASSERTION is similarly inappropriate.

A REUSE.software scan will produce false-positives if it has no way to distinguish the case of uncopyrightable material.  This issue came up because my group has empty files (placeholders) and blank forms (templates) in OSS.  Since we require a clean scan on each build, we have to maintain a workaround to eliminate the false positives.
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My apologies if you find this poll inappropriate: I thought I had submitted this concern weeks ago as a message, but I am now unable to find it -- nor have I got any response. Therefore I am taking this route to get my question addressed.

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