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

[Bill Shannon <bill.shannon@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Until you convince Oracle legal, the rules remain the same for
Oracle-owned content.

Matija Šuklje wrote on 1/10/19 11:26 PM:
> 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.
>