6 Nov
2024
6 Nov
'24
2:35 a.m.
On Tue, Nov 5, 2024, 1:25 PM Christian Hopps <chopps(a)chopps.org> wrote:
If you rewrote everything, that's an original work. There's nothing in
copyright law that talks about process only the end result. While it is
nice to leave yhe original copyright, it's not necessary when there's no
original material left. And there is some incentive to remove it because
you don't want to incorrectly represent who has IP in the file.
Maybe this is just overly careful, but it’s what I’ve done in all my
On Nov 5, 2024, at 18:58, Warner Losh
<imp(a)bsdimp.com> wrote:
…
These days, most open source authors would
replace the copyright statement with their own for such an extensive
rewrite
since the diff was over 2x the size of the
original file (another very
imperfect
measure). Though the comments remaining identical
is troublesome because
they are the parts of the code that are the most creative and subject to
the
most freedom while the for loops and such are
largely dictated by the
problem
or C language and customary style.
This was interesting to me. I’ve been writing various open source for 20+
years and I think maybe I was given a much stricter rule to follow when I
started out and which I’ve followed since — it may very well be wrong but
it’s what I’ve followed.
If I started with some code with a copyright at the top, and I rewrote
every line I would not replace the copyright but add mine to the file. I
was told this was the correct action b/c you aren’t allowed to use the
previous code as an aide to writing your new code and consider it only your
own, it’s derivative in that case.
projects (starting back in the 90s with NetBSD and on
to contributing to
many other open source projects over time).
Yea. While many would replace the copyright for the scenario I described,
many would add their copyright. It's a judgment call: are the changes
transformative to the work or not? There are several creators that take old
Disney film footage and legally remox it into something new. The original
is clearly there, but changed enough to be outside copyright protection.
Sadly, there are no simple, universal rules that let you do this analysis
completely mechanically.
Warner
Thanks,
Chris.