Re: Licensing of NEWS files?

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>
>> Date: Thu, 15 Oct 2015 17:58:30 +0200
>> 
>> 
>> Our various NEWS files, according to the license statement at the end,
>> are distributed under the GPL.  That seems sort of overkill.
>
> I'm not sure I agree.  Our NEWS includes non-trivial documentation.

So?

>> What actually annoyed me is that the various NEWS files are all also
>> marked (c) 2015 in spite of not being really a part of the current
>> Emacs.
>
> What do you mean by "not part of the current Emacs"?  All the NEWS
> files are included in a release tarball.

Which is very much the definition of "mere aggregation".  Apart from the
NEWS itself (which is accessible with C-h N), the files are not
integrated with any part of Emacs code.  They are just sitting there.

> We always mark all files each year.

Obviously.  But those are historic files separate from the current
version of Emacs.  The content industry would love to remark copyrights
for anything it keeps in circulation as an unchanged addition to
something new.  It would be quite cheaper than bribing politicians for
retroactive copyright extensions every few decades.

-- 
David Kastrup