Re: Licensing of NEWS files?

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>]

Dmitry Gutov writes:
 > On 10/15/2015 07:19 PM, Marcin Borkowski wrote:
 > 
 > > Isn't Fair Use limited to US law?

Yes and no.  Some other jurisdictions (eg, Japan) have legal
provisions that implement the same kind of exceptions; the U.S. leaves
it up to the judge.  (Like "My Fair Lady", "fair" use is beautiful in
the eye of the beholder, not "just".)  Giving the practice of leaving
it up to the judge legal status ("fair use" is mentioned in the law)
is unique to the U.S., I believe.

 > I believe so. But Emacs copyright is registered in the US.

Irrelevant.  Under the Berne Convention and other international law,
*copyright* is universal and automatic.  However, the rights of
various parties are defined by national law.  There may be cases where
acts in Germany are considered to be covered by U.S. law, but I doubt
Deutsche Allgemeine (sp?) quoting NEWS is.

David Kastrup writes:

 > Granted, that did not annoy me as much for licensing reasons as
 > it did for making it unable to get a rough estimate when the various
 > major versions of Emacs had been released.

Every source distribution of XEmacs has precise dates for historical
releases of both forks up to about 2004 (I don't know it they're
accurate, but I suppose they are pretty close) in the header comment
in emacs.c.  I believe the same information is available somewhere on
Jamie's site, perhaps more recently updated.

More recent releases should be in git.