Re: copyright notice format

[Thomas Vander Stichele <thomas urgent rug ac be>]

Hi,

I think that on pretty much all of the questions we need sound legal 
advice, not guesswork.

I agree that copyright messages should be standardized.

But ...

> But the copyright message still often needs translation, since it's not
> uncommon that the author names need umlauts or other characters not
> provided with plain ASCII, as Karl Eichwalder already pointed out.

Is it even useful to translate names ? I mean, does the copyright lose 
value if the name doesn't have the proper umlaut in place ?

> Also,
> variants like:

> 
> "Copyright (C) 2002 Foo Bar and many others"
> "Copyright (C) 2002 Foo Bar and Baz"
> 
> etc. need to have those last parts and the "and":s and so on translated.

Is it really necessary to translate copyright messages AT ALL ?

The point of translation, to me, is make the application usable by native 
speakers.  The copyright message serves a wholly different goal, namely 
enforcing legal copyright.  I think the two are very different, and I 
seriously doubt the use of translating these messages at all.

For us to decide these things, we need real legal advice that tells us 
things like
a) what is the correct way to assert copyright in the source ?
b) what are the rules in deciding under which country's law the copyright 
falls ? Ie, if we have code from various nationalities, translated to
various locales, then what country's rules apply ? The original coder's 
countries ? THe locale's countries ? A matrix of the two ?

I think that if we are planning on reorganizing this, and making this 
uniform (a worthwhile goal), we should start by defining what it is we 
want to achieve instead of only looking at the translator's view of 
things.

Personally, I would find it hard to believe that translating (C) to ? 
depending on the target language would ever do us any good in a court room 
;)

Thomas

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