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

[Christian Neumair <christian-neumair web de>]

Am Son, 2002-09-22 um 23.11 schrieb Christian Rose:
> sön 2002-09-22 klockan 15.24 skrev Rhys Jones:
> > > 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.
> > 
> > Hi Gareth :) This *may* be what you're looking for:
> > http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-html/1995May/0080.html
> 
> According to the discussion in
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=45297, US Code Title 17
> Section 401 doesn't mention "(C)". It just mentions "©", "Copyright",
> and "Copr." as valid expressions for copyright, so it may still be that
> "©" is preferrable to "(C)" even in the US.
> The laws of other countries might not recognize the term "Copyright" at
> all (http://www.benedict.com/info/notice/notice.asp), so it seems a
> proper "©" must be present.
> 
> This of course applies to the rest of the translations as well and not
> just the po file header -- I always "translate" all references to "(C)"
> in a msgid to a proper "©" in the corresponding msgstr.

OK, a few months later the situation didn't improve. Here comes my
proposal:
(C) <year of first published code>-<year of last code update> <author>,
e.g.
(C) 2001-2002 Red Hat, Inc.
(C) 1998-2001 whoever
btw.: Do we refer to the FSF as The Free Software Foundation, Free
Software Foundation or the Free Software Foundation?
I'd like to commit those changes as soon as possible because I guess
this mess confuses many translators and it isn't very useful to have
more than one string for exactly the same copyright entry.

regs,
 Chris