Re: [jakarta.ee-community] Happy New Copyright Year!

[Matija Šuklje <matija.suklje@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On sreda, 02. januar 2019 23:38:58 CET Michael Müller wrote:
> The European copyright gladly does not need to mention any year.
> It's bound to the author, not to the time. So why do American's
> need to mention the year?

Since the Berne convention, copyright is indeed automatic and any 
work of authorship is automatically protected by it.

The urge to absolutely have to write copyright statements stems 
from the inertia in the USA, as it only joined the Berne 
convention well after computer programs were a thing (i.e. in 
1989), and so until then still required the copyright statement in 
order for a work to be protected; also some FOSS licenses require 
them to be kept in tact (if they existed, when you copied the 
code).

Not every contribution is original or substantial enough to be 
copyrightable – even the popular 5 (or 10, or X) SLOC rule of 
thumb is, legally-speaking, very debatable.

Especially in USA, copyright notices are formalised as – but even 
there the years of major changes are optional! – see:

```
$copyright_sign_or_equivalent $year_of_creation 
[$year(s)_of_major_change] $copyright_holder
```

That being said, I think the yearly bump of the year is a lot of 
work trying to tackle some very minuscule risk.

Let us imagine the worst possible scenario: _1)_ Project never 
bumps the year in a copyright statement in a file and _2)_ 50+ 
years¹ after the initial release, someone would copy the code as 
if it were in public domain. Now, if we would have issue with that 
and go to court, and _3)_ the court would (very unlikely) only 
take the copyright headers of that file into account and therefore 
_4)_ rule that the code in that file has fallen under public 
domain and the FOSS license does not apply to it any more. The end 
result would simply be that (in one jurisdiction) that file would 
fall into public domain and be up for grabs by anyone for 
anything, no copyleft, 50+ years from the file’s creation (instead 
of e.g. 5, maybe 20 years later).

Nothing prevents you from having a code base where all  the old 
files carry the old year and the files that were created later 
carry a newer year.

But, honestly, how likely is it that 50 years from now the same 
(unaltered) code would still be interesting to exploit?

And even if you think FOSS code flowing into the public domain 50+ 
years from its first publication is a risk you do not want to 
take, you still have 50 years to bump the year before it becomes 
an issue. For the super-risk-averse year-bumpers, scheduling a 
reminder every decade should be totally enough IMHO.

Personally, I don’t think it’s worth the bother and should be 
abolished …

cheers,
Matija Šuklje
—
1	“Life plus 50 years” is the minimum under the Berne convention 
(and TRIPS), but it still differs from jurisdiction to 
jurisdiction. For example in almost all of EU and in USA it is 
(life plus) 70 years, while in India it is (life plus) 60 years, 
and in China and Japan only (life plus) 50 years.
-- 
Liferay International
Licensing Counsel

matija.suklje@xxxxxxxxxxx
tel:+1.323.544.5968