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List:       koffice-devel
Subject:    Re: koffice policies and copyright policy
From:       Inge Wallin <inge () lysator ! liu ! se>
Date:       2010-09-06 14:33:42
Message-ID: 201009061633.43209.inge () lysator ! liu ! se
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On Monday, September 06, 2010 12:54:12 zander@kde.org wrote:
> On Friday 3. September 2010 10.15.07 Cyrille Berger wrote:
> > Also more the policy is more about being safe and conservative, than to
> > be strictly accurate. Since as mentioned by the SFLC, a wrong copyright
> > line is  just legally null, a missing one, however, is a legal threat.
> 
> This is incorrect; you are limiting your view to the usage of the claim to
> copyright as a defensive point to infringement.

To say that an interpretation of law is "incorrect" when you are not a lawyer 
in your own jurisdiction is a very bold thing to do. It would be interesting 
to hear what you base this on.

Many years ago I read a text from the FSF in their FAQ about the following 
scenario:

 "Suppose we have a file under the GPL and we want to rewrite all the code in 
it to not be under GPL.  When we are done rewriting it all, would we then be 
free of the GPL? Nothing whatsoever of the old code would remain."

The answer was a clear No. And the reason was that even if no code remained 
then you would still have the structure from it and your work would clearly be 
a derivative.  I think we have the same situation here.  You can never 
manipulate a source file without being influenced by the old contents.  
Thereby you would automatically have a derivative work, and therefore all the 
old copyrights should be kept.

You could of course argue against this, but I would give you slim chances in 
court.

> This is not the only point of view; we have files in KWord that have been
> started by people 15 years ago and they have dissapeared.
> If you claim those lines can not be removed even while I am pretty darn
> sure there is no copyright left, then in some cases I am forced to throw
> away a LOT of good code if I want to do some relicencing (like we recently
> did to (L)GPLv2+) or similar.
> 
> The law says that if I remove someone's content I don't have to attribute
> that person anymore. 

I call BS on this.  Citation needed.

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