Re: unifying copyright entries (was: [RFC] General terminology change)

[Pat Costello <Patrick Costello Sun COM>]

The view from the documentation perspective...

Thanks for bringing up this point. I did a bit of research and here are my 
findings: 

- A discrete piece of software or documentation should always contain a proper 
copyright notice. A statement of the bleating obvious you say, well, the key 
word here is "proper". 

- A proper copyright notice consists of the following: 

	o 	The word "Copyright" or, if there is a shortage of space, the 		
		copyright symbol, which is a C in a closed circle. 

		NOTE: (c) has no legal weight. Never use (c). 
	
	o 	The year of first publication of the work, usually the year of 
		FCS.
		
	o 	The owner of the copyright. 
	
I've just noticed that in the Help and other documentation we have been using 
both the word "Copyright" and the copyright symbol in our copyright notices. 
Whereas this is not wrong, it is belt-and-braces and really should be just 
"Copyright". I need to take up this topic on the gnome-doc-list. I also need to 
include the above information in the GNOME Documentation Style Guide so we have 
the topic covered for future reference. 

Pat
	
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> Subject: Re: unifying copyright entries (was: [RFC] General terminology 
change)
> To: Gareth Bowker <tgb tgb org uk>
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> Am Son, 2002-09-22 um 12.46 schrieb Gareth Bowker:
> > On Sun, Sep 22, 2002 at 11:57:08AM +0200, Christian Neumair wrote:
> > > Another aspect are the copyright entries:
> > > Some developery use
> > > (C) <year> <name> or
> > > Copyright (C) <name> <year>,
> > > some others
> > > <name> (C) <year>
> > > and so on.
> > > What's the "official" (or at least the most used) expression?
> > > Additionally, we should replace the (C) by a copyright character
> > > wherever possible (e.g. UTF-8, ISO-8859-X charsets).
> > 
> > I heard a while ago that you should always write the word Copyright in full,
> > e.g.
> > 
> > Copyright (C) 2002 Free Software Foundation
> > 
> > That's also the most-used form I've seen.
> > 
> > I seem to recall that (C) holds no legal meaning, the copyright symbol
> > however does. Or something like that. It was a long time ago.
> 
> Whohoo!
> Just look at gnome-panel HEAD po. I think we broke our record:
> (c) 2001 Red Hat, Inc.
> (C) 2002 Red Hat, Inc.
> (c) 2001 Red Hat, Inc
> Copyright 2002 Red Hat, Inc.
> 
> I hope we'll find a solution until 2.2 is released.
> 
> regs,
>  Chris
> 
> 
> -- 
> 
>   Jeder erbärmliche Tropf, der nichts in der Welt hat, darauf er stolz
> seyn könnte,
>   ergreift das letzte Mittel, auf die Nation, der er gerade angehört,
> stolz zu seyn.
> 
> 	Artur Schopenhauer, Parerga und Paralipomena
> 
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