Re: poll interval - RFC compliance question

Unruh said the following on 06/15/2008 11:35 AM:

Yes, it is pedantry, since the copyright is automatic and does not need to
be asserted. Ie, that notice is infomational, not a legal requirement.
It simply informs the reader as to who actually owns the copyright. What is
not mere pedantry is where or not this claim is actually true. Many people
have contributed to ntpd, and unless they all transfered copyright to David
Mills, then the claim that he owns the copyright is really false. They all
do (David has copyright interest in all of the works since the other
people's work is derivative of his work, but others have copyright interest
as well.) To keep things perfectly clean, David shoule ask anyone who
contributes to transfer their copyright to him.

While the notice is not mandatory, it does have legal value -- in
particular, it negates a defense of innocent infringement. And, to
claim the international protection of the UCC treaty I referred to in my
other message, you do need to include the notice.

Your point about whether the copyright notice is accurate is
interesting. I wonder if it would even be possible at this point to
determine who all the contributors are!

I thought that Linux used the CREDITS file as a list of copyright
holders, but I just looked at some source and that doesn't appear to be
the case -- instead, each source file has its own copyright notice in
the name of one or more people, with the COPYING file not listing any
copyright owners at all. I guess that has the effect of putting the
whole kernel tree under the GPL, but the resulting object file(s) as a
collective work of all the contributors.

I just looked at the ntp 4.2.0 source (the only tree I have handy at the
moment) and the random source files I looked at do not have any
copyright notice at all, so the Linux model doesn't appear to be in place.

John
.

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