[MLton] copyright

[Ville Laurikari]

On Sun, Apr 05, 2009 at 02:35:17PM -0500, Matthew Fluet wrote:
> On Sat, 4 Apr 2009, Ville Laurikari wrote:
>> -## Copyright (C) 2005-2006 Henry Cejtin, Matthew Fluet, Suresh
>> +## Copyright (C) 2005-2009 Henry Cejtin, Matthew Fluet, Suresh
>
> BTW, I'm not sure that it is appropriate to assert Copyright through
> years in which the source file did not change.  It is certainly easier to
> maintain a simple contiguous range; however, it doesn't seem to be the
> case that projects do a massive Copyright++ on Jan. 1 of each year, which
> suggests that it should only be asserted for the years in which the
> source file is created or modified (in a non-trivial way?).

Nowadays, most of the world is with the Berne Convention:
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention_for_the_Protection_of_Literary_and_Artistic_Works

The convention says (in article 5 part 2):
  http://www.law.cornell.edu/treaties/berne/5.html

 "The enjoyment and the exercise of these rights shall not be subject
  to any formality"

This means that we don't actually need any kind of copyright assertion
texts at all.  One can put some in, but they have no legal meaning.
They are only useful to remind the reader that there's a copyright;
which is probably a good thing, so why not.  Anyway, the copyright
years are pretty much useless for legal purposes.

Now, there are some developing countries which are outside the Berne
Convention.  But, I'd argue that you would be hard pressed to litigate
copyright violations in these countries anyway, so it doesn't really
matter.

And no, I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.  (I suppose
that disclaimer is still needed at least in the US...  not needed in
Finland :-)

--
http://laurikari.net/ville/