copyright for merged code

copyright for merged code

[Thien-Thi Nguyen]

i'm presently updating the copyright years in lisp/net/ and
have come upon a doubt: certain files have been merged from
outside emacs, w/ copyright notices that show years prior
to their merging (as far as i can tell from looking at the
"cvs log" output for these files).  i am inclined to remove
those years completely, but would like confirmation that this
is the correct approach.

thi

Re: copyright for merged code

[David Kastrup]

Thien-Thi Nguyen <ttn@surf.glug.org> writes:

> i'm presently updating the copyright years in lisp/net/ and
> have come upon a doubt: certain files have been merged from
> outside emacs, w/ copyright notices that show years prior
> to their merging (as far as i can tell from looking at the
> "cvs log" output for these files).  i am inclined to remove
> those years completely, but would like confirmation that this
> is the correct approach.

Those files could only have been merged because of a copyright
assignment or copyright disclaimer.  In the case of a copyright
assignment, the copyrightable years of the original file remain valid
for the copyright claims of the FSF.  In the case of a disclaimer
(which is pretty rare in the Emacs code base), the FSF has no
copyright for changes prior to the import of the file, but one should
likely keep the original notices of the import intact, I'd guess.  In
particular if the software was not placed generally into the public
domain, but just disclaimed to the FSF for the purpose of using it in
GPLed form in Emacs (I seem to remember that some parts of MULE have
this status).

That's my take on the matter, and of course my take is not actually
relevant.  So you should wait for Richard'd comment before doing
anything.

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum

Re: copyright for merged code

[Richard Stallman]

    i'm presently updating the copyright years in lisp/net/ and
    have come upon a doubt: certain files have been merged from
    outside emacs, w/ copyright notices that show years prior
    to their merging (as far as i can tell from looking at the
    "cvs log" output for these files).  i am inclined to remove
    those years completely, but would like confirmation that this
    is the correct approach.

Please keep the years that were put in the notices before
the files were installed into Emacs.