Re: Adding advisory notification for non-ELPA package.el downloads

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Paul Rankin <hello@paulwrankin.com>
> Cc: rms@gnu.org, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Fri, 21 Jul 2017 00:36:40 +1000
> 
> Copyright is not merely functional, and you're reducing it to even
> lesser functional purposes by arguing that given assigning copyright to
> the FSF retains the subset of functional purposes of copyright that are
> important to you, then they are effectively the same and should be
> treated the same for everyone. Copyright is not its function, rather its
> functions arise as the manifestations of the importance we see in
> authorship as ownership. That's a symbolic importance, and while that
> may not mean much to you, it's where all the functional purposes above
> come from. Owning a thing, and having rights to that thing as if you
> owned it, are not the same thing.

AFAIK, the original author still owns the code he/she wrote, even
after the assignment, and the authorship information is not lost by
assigning the copyright.  If that is true, then your concerns are
based on misunderstandings.

I would like to stress that it's IMO okay not to agree to assign
copyright, for whatever reasons.  We just need to make sure that
people don't make these decisions based on misconceptions about what
the assignment means, legally and practically, for the original author
of the code.  Once the decision is an informed one, it's eventually
the call of each one of us whether to assign or not.