Year references in Copyright statements in code

For Developers
1

I'm trying to contribute to OpenWRT. To get into it i'm updating some packages to more recent versions. I noticed that most code files have a copyright statement in the header with a year or period indication. It seems not everybody updates these headers, which makes it useless (?). For example:

# Copyright (C) 2006-2014 OpenWrt.org

What is currently the instruction given to developers? Should this copyright statement be updated/removed/replaced?

Also some variations are documented: https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-developer/packages

My personal preference would be to have headers which don't "age".

2

Copyright ages in places where it is in law.

3

Yeah sometimes it's relevant or important to state the initial date of publish and sometimes when it just got an updated. Take a look at various books you have at home for some inspiration.

Site note/ fun fact: In Germany for example you can not legally use CC zero or public domain because you can not loose or give away the "autorenschaft" (the state of ownership). You can only give away a license for usage, like GPL and stuff. Sure you can demand that it's not required to name your ownership but technically you don't use it.
The only expectation I'm aware off, are products you produce for someone else, like an employer. During office hours, everything you produce is the property of the employer.

4

It was discussed actively a few years ago,

And the guidance from devs was to leave years unchanged if you are not part of the core team.

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5

Am I correct that I can copyright my own code modifications in addition to the OpenWrt copyright for my substantial functional changes to, for example, a procd init.d script?

6

I don't know the official guidance on that but I have not been adding copyright into my own small or moderate changes.

I think that that commit authorship already gives some claim to the changes.

7

Nor do I. Iā€™m referring to what is termed here as derivative works that seems to be treated differently depending on the particular national copyright laws.

Probably a question better asked of SFC.

8

I have no idea even if any "instruction" even exists.
However, a few years ago, from a business point of view, I took legal advice and was given these general guidelines:

  1. The original author (be it a business entity, an individual or a list of both/either) includes a Copyright notice (and with software, a licence). It will contain the authors name(s) in the list and the publication/release year.
  2. The duration of the Copyright will depend on country/region and varies commonly from 50 to 70 years. Note that Copyright can end up expired in some countries but still valid in others.
  3. If a NEW version/edition/etc is published/released, the year of the copyright should be updated by ADDING another year. This can be a list of years or more usually in the format of initial - current years, eg as in the example in the first post in this thread (# Copyright (C) 2006-2014 OpenWrt.org).
  4. Adding a new "current release date" restarts the duration clock. In the example in point 3 above, the Copyright expires in 2084 in the EU but 2064 in the US.
  5. The author(s) listed in the Copyright Notice should NOT be added to except when specifically agreed in writing by those original authors.
  6. Additional authors of "NEW" sections/chapters/parts/etc can be added by inserting a separate Copyright Notice, but the original licence will still apply.
  7. OpenWrt is different to a commercial outfit (but not uniquely so) in that, particularly with kernel and many package modules, source code is downloaded for cross-compiling, often with patches added after. In this case the source code Copyright and licence still applies, but any patches should have their own Copyright Notices and licences. Makefiles should NOT have a Copyright Notice, but should display the Licence of the source code.

This is how it was explained to me at the time and may well not be the full story or cover all edge cases.

Summarising this (from what I was informed by legal council):

  1. Don't touch source code Copyright notices unless you are the author and are making a new release. (You probably can't anyway unless you have access to the source files)
  2. Don't update package patch files with a new "year" added to the Copyright notice in the code unless you are the author of the patches and are making a new OpenWrt release.

If anyone has a different version, please speak up!

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