Re: copyright notice format

[James Henstridge <james daa com au>]

Christian Neumair wrote:

> I hope we all agree on the fact that having more than one way of
> refering to authors is a bad thing as it produces many unnecessary
> strings which all have to be translated and because we should keep
> consistency.
> It's really annoying if you have to translate strings like
>  Copyright (C) 1999-2002 Red Hat
> and
> (C) 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002 Red Hat, Inc.
> in one product or module.
> So we had to find a consistent pattern:
> My first proposal was
> (C) <first-year-code-was-published>-<last-year-code-was-published> <author>
> as the inital author holds the copyright and (C) is much shorter thanlot
> of  "Copyright" and of course than "Copyright (C)". Furthermore, (C) is
> officially recognized as an identifier for copyright.
> After reading some articles on copyright laws and copyright in general I
> decided to use
> (C) <first-year-code-was-published> <author>.
> In some products / modules (like gnome-panel) there occur a great many
> copyright strings and the first proposal requires the maintainers to
> change the strings every year which is very annoying because it produces
> new strings for the translators. Additionally, I think in this case the
> following is valid, too: The shorter the better.
> Next I did was using Free Software Foundation_, Inc._ or Red Hat_, Inc._
> as a reference to companies. This makes clear that no individual holds
> the copyright on that software. Just have a look at the strings before I
> commited the changes. Some read "The Free Software Foundation" (, Inc.
> missing), some "Red Hat Inc." (missing comma) and so on.
> I hope you now understand a bit why I started the discussion on
> gnome-i18n.
> I'm still sorry for all the mess I aroused and deeply sorry for the
> maintainers I bugged but I can't say anything more than that I'm not
> very experienced and wanted to push those efforts.
>  
They have a bit to say about this in the GNU coding standards:

   This copyright notice only needs to mention the most recent year in
   which changes were made--there's no need to list the years for
   previous versions' changes.  You don't have to mention the name of
   the program in these notices, if that is inconvenient, since it
   appeared in the first line.

   Translations of the above lines must preserve the validity of the
   copyright notices (*note Internationalization::).  If the
   translation's character set supports it, the `(C)' should be
   replaced with the copyright symbol, as follows:

   (the official copyright symbol, which is the letter C in a circle);

   Write the word "Copyright" exactly like that, in English.  Do not
   translate it into another language.  International treaties
   recognize the English word "Copyright"; translations into other
   languages do not have legal significance.

The main points of interest here is that the _last_ year a release was 
made is important (the others are not necessary, but not harmful), and 
the word "Copyright" should not be translated.  So it could be argued 
that a string like "Copyright (C) YEAR PERSON" usually shouldn't be 
translated at all.

James.

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