Seeking input from developers: glibc copyright assignment policy.

[Florian Weimer]

* Bradley M. Kuhn:

>> On 7/6/21 11:05 AM, Bradley M. Kuhn wrote:
>> > Is the “GNU Toolchain Authors” a entity that legally exists?  Only a real
>> > entity should be listed in a copyright notice.
>
> Paul Eggert replied:
>> Yes and no. It's OK for a copyright notice to identify owners by reference
>> instead of by naming them explicitly. See section 2205.2(F) of the Copyright
>> Compendium I mentioned earlier
>> <https://www.copyright.gov/comp3/chap2200/ch2200-notice.pdf>. It gives
>> "copyright by publisher" as an example, where the publisher must be obvious
>> from the rest of the document content.
>
> Neither of us are lawyers, so it'd be best to work this through with a
> copyright attorney if we want better answers.  Relaying the conversations
> I've had with copyright attorneys on this: the publisher is of course also
> already a legal entity, too, and also there is litigation around this that
> won't show up in the Copyright Office circulars.
>
> Additionally, I and my colleagues at Conservancy have had no end of
> discussions with folks from the Copyright Office to get the “real story”
> about various things that just don't show up in the circulars as well.
>
>> I agree that it'd be helpful to have such a file if well-maintained,
>> regardless of whether we make changes to the existing copyright
>> notices. I'd welcome contributions along those lines.
>
> I'll speak to my colleagues at Conservancy to see if we can fund staff time
> to make a patchset of this nature for glibc.  I'll probably need a week or so
> to get back to you on that, but it is unlikely to be urgent.

Would this result in a accurate list of copyright holders and their
licenses, or just present the existing data from the source tree in a
new way?  The second approach does not strike me as a good idea because
the current data is likely quite inaccurate, and resubmitting it makes
it seem more authoritative than it actually is.

Thanks,
Florian