Copyright notices

[Robert Dewar]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> The last sentence is what took me by surprise, when Richard Stallman
> asked people who work on Emacs to add 2006 to _all_ the files in the
> distribution, regardless of whether they were modified in that year or
> not.

Well copyright notices have little if any legal significance these
days, so I guess you can claim whatever you want without affecting
the copyright status, but it sure seems strange to me to claim
copyright for a new year if no substantive changes are made (I
don't think you can use a recursive argument that says that you
have updated the copyright because you *have* modified the file,
namely you have updated the copyright year :-)
> 
> Perhaps we should have a script to do the same once a year, and stop
> worrying about updating the individual notices when we modify each
> file.

If it is going to be done by algorithm, then it seems a bit of a waste
of time anyway. Given that the copyright lasts 90 years, I often wonder
why we bother at all with this copyright year update stuff.