Re: d/copyright years when upstream does not use years?

O 21/08/26 ás 20:47, The Wanderer <[email protected]> escribiu:
> On 2026-08-21 at 14:13, Russ Allbery wrote:
> 
>> Walter Landry <[email protected]> writes:
>>
>>> Peter Pentchev <[email protected]> writes:
> 
>>>> So IMHO there are both good and bad things in copyright notices that
>>>> do not include years:
>>>> - good thing: you don't need to update it each year, and it does not
>>>>    get very, very long as you skip a year every now and then :)
>>>> - bad thing: it seems that, at least in the United States, such
>>>>    a copyright notice may not be recognized in court
>>
>>> Copyright attaches even if you do not have a copyright notice.  A year
>>> makes it more clear when it applies, so enforcement gets easier if you
>>> can point to it.
>>
>> In US law specifically, you have to have a copyright notice to claim
>> statutory damages, which in practice often means that claiming damages is
>> effectively impossible without a copyright notice. (My understanding is
>> that you would then have to prove actual harm, which is expensive and
>> difficult.)
>>
>> But there is no legal requirement to have a copyright notice, and upstream
>> is entitled to not have one if they don't want to have one. That's not
>> something Debian gets to decide for upstream. I think our obligation under
>> the license (and just in general as good citizens) is to reproduce
>> whatever notice upstream uses, even if it's not a legal copyright notice
>> under US law.
> 
> (For avoidance of doubt, I concur with and/or confirm - as applicable -
> all of this.)
> 
>> If upstream doesn't use such a notice, or omits some customary part
>> of it like the years, I'm kind of dubious about us inventing one, and
>> I'm not sure what would require us to do so.
> 
> I can see one benefit from having years, which isn't really relevant
> yet, but could become so in the future:
> 
> Unless I'm very much mistaken (which is always possible), the date of a
> copyright determines when that copyright will expire, and the
> copyrighted material will enter the public domain.
> 

It depends. Under the Berne Convention, copyright protection extends for 
the lifetime of the author plus (at minimum) 50 years. Pseudonymous 
works do get copyright 50 years after being published, and I guess this 
could apply to developers whose usernames can't be traced to real people.