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

[Bernd Walter]

On Sat, Mar 19, 2011 at 02:14:01PM +0100, Harald Kipp wrote:
> Hi Henrik,
> 
> On 3/19/2011 3:48 AM, Henrik Maier wrote:
> > I suggest to remove any copyright headers from trivial files and leave
> > it to lawyers to determine if that trivial file can be protected or not
> > or if it can be considered public domain.
> 
> Not adding any copyright notice at all is even more difficult to handle. 
> It actually means, that the author didn't provide any license at all. 
> It's up to the user to decide whether he risks any copyright violation.
> 
> >    * The following source file constitutes example program code and is
> >    * intended merely to illustrate useful programming techniques.  The user
> >    * is responsible for applying the code correctly.
> >    * Re-use of this code is encouraged and the author does not claim any
> > copyright for the following example code.
> 
> This may imply, that the author may have "stolen" the code and it's up 
> to the user to find out, who's the original author.
> 
> But that's not what I want. Instead I wanted to declare, that the 
> original authors will not claim any copyright and that the user is free 
> to take it from these original authors for any purpose, under any license.
> 
> As Bernd correctly stated, at least in many European countries you 
> cannot disclaim a copyright. Copyrights may expire, but the period is 
> fixed by law.

That's a very strong _may_ in the expire rule.
As long as the author is still alive they won't expire - this is
very different from patents.
They only expire a given number of years after death of the author,
not sure if this is the same in every important country.
In the meantime the copyright holder are the heirs.
Especially the USA increased the expiretime by a major amount just about
a decade ago in form of the Copyright Term Extension Act, which is also
known as the Mickey Mouse Protection Act.

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