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

["Markus KARG" <markus@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

As Jakarta EE is an Eclipse Foundation project, what do you mean with "Oracle-owned"?
-Markus

-----Original Message-----
From: jakarta.ee-community-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:jakarta.ee-community-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Bill Shannon
Sent: Freitag, 11. Januar 2019 21:39
To: Jakarta EE community discussions; Matija Šuklje
Subject: Re: [jakarta.ee-community] Happy New Copyright Year!

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.
> 
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