[En-Nut-Discussion] RFC: Copyright of trivial code

[Bernd Walter]

On Fri, Mar 18, 2011 at 09:47:32AM -0400, Nathan Moore wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 18, 2011 at 6:32 AM, Bernd Walter <enut at cicely.de> wrote:
> 
> > On Fri, Mar 18, 2011 at 09:47:00AM +0100, Harald Kipp wrote:
> > > Hi all,
> > >
> > > there are several simple files, for which a copyright notice looks
> > > overdone to me, specifically header and make files.
> > >
> > > I suggest to change their copyright to
> > >
> > > "The authors disclaim all copyrights and release this document into
> > > the public domain."
> >
> > You can't disclaim a copyright and you don't need to declare it
> > to have a copyright.
> > An author always has the copyright - declared or not and he can't ever
> > loose it.
> >
> 
> This varies greatly from place to place.  Some jurisdictions do have
> transfer of
> copyright ownership, and some jurisdictions allow you to relinquish
> ownership
> to the public domain.  This is international, so it's very complicated.

Most major countires, including the EU and the USA have agreed to some
basic rules.
Formerly the copyright law in the USA required that you explicitly need
to claim copyright.
But I'm not a lawyer either.

> I think the main issue with changing the copyright notices in any way are
> that
> all owners (for all jurisdictions perspectives) need to agree to those
> changes.

Yes - we see it in the FreeBSD project with changing from 4 clause to 3
clause BSD license - it still remains in a few places.

> Anyway, I am not a lawyer in any jurisdiction, so I could be very wrong on
> this,
> but it is my understanding of the issues here.
> 
> Nathan

-- 
B.Walter <bernd at bwct.de> http://www.bwct.de
Modbus/TCP Ethernet I/O Baugruppen, ARM basierte FreeBSD Rechner uvm.