5 ms·

> but you never put copyright notices in your files. I thought having a LICENSE file in the project's root directory was sufficient. Is it not the case?

ryao 2y ago
It is a fairly standard practice in at least some open source communities to add copyright notices to files that people have changed significantly, although there is no well defined minimum threshold for how much permits them to add a copyright notice. Thus, someone else can come along, fork the project, add copyright notices to all of the files and then give the impression that they wrote them, since there is no attribution aside from the one LICENSE file that you wrote. The git history might show the truth, but if they copy the files into a fresh git repository, that metadata will be lost. Projects take files from one another all the time, so there is no guarantee that they will preserve your commit history and then anyone curious who wrote the code needs to do digital archaeology. That said, file level copyright notices are not perfect (since only the VCS shows who added what lines and that might not be preserved), but it is better than nothing and it is something that is guaranteed to persist as long as people are abiding by licenses. If they are not, that is copyright infringement and the copyright holder can do things like send cease and desist notices in response to the copyright notices being removed. Also, I must emphasize that I am not a lawyer, but one might argue that it was not willful infringement if someone removed a copyright notice from 1 file by claiming it had been a mistake. However, if they remove it from all files, then nobody is going to believe it was not willful.
- johnisgood 2y ago
  Thanks! I have some open source projects where I only have one LICENSE file (it is also in README), but I will consider adding it to all files, there are just too many files. :/ I am inconsistent, because I have projects that contain the copyright notice in all files.
  - ryao 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - matkoniecz 2y ago
      Why you think that LLM-generated legal advise is worth posting on forum for humans?
      - DrammBA 2y ago
        > Why you think that LLM-generated legal advise is worth posting on forum for humans? Can you quote which part of the LLM chat above constitutes legal advice? I read the whole chat and didn't see any.
        DrammBA 2y ago
        for reference this was the chat that allegedly contained legal advice: https://chatgpt.com/share/6806382f-7944-800f-95aa-8c770276237e https://chatgpt.com/share/6806382f-7944-800f-95aa-8c77027623...
        ryao 2y ago
        It does not. It simply discusses ways of adding headers to arbitrary source code. The intention is to add license and copyright headers, but the reality is that these headers can say anything. It is discussing generic techniques for doing this.
      - johnisgood 2y ago
        It is for inserting a copyright notice in the files, I will use a for loop and sed for it though. I'm old school. :P
      - ryao 2y ago
veltas 2y ago
Sufficient but a good idea to put copyright in all files. Technically if there's no license found then it should be considered automatically copyrighted, with no permissions to copy. So leaving copyright license out actually makes it less open source.
- ryao 2y ago
  The license does not necessarily need to be in the files. It could be a project level license in LICENSE, which is what the author here did.
  - veltas 2y ago
    Yes that's exactly what I said :)
  - dboreham 2y ago
    It's not the license that's important, but the copyright notice.
  - frumplestlatz 2y ago
    It really should be in all files, not because it’s legally necessary, but because it’s the best way to ensure that the correct license/copyright follows the code to which it applies. Consider future contributions; the contributor’s copyright should apply only to the files to which they contributed. Similarly, consider any code that you incorporate from external sources; that code’s copyright and license should only apply to the files in which it has been incorporated. Lastly, consider the case where the code is copied out of your project to be incorporated in a different project. The license and copyright should follow with those files (and if your files don’t include copyright and license at the top, it’s very likely the person doing that copying will insert it themselves for this same reason).
    - ryao 2y ago
      I was responding to this: Sufficient but a good idea to put copyright in all files. Technically if there's no license found then it should be considered automatically copyrighted, with no permissions to copy. So leaving copyright license out actually makes it less open source. I said it is not legally necessary to have that in every file in the previous comment solely to contradict the idea that his project level LICENSE file did not constitute a license for the individual files. I did not at any time suggest that it was not a good idea to put notices in every file. In fact, if you look at my other comments, you will see that I said that he should have put copyright notices into every file multiple times. I even said it at the root of this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43750850 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43750850
dboreham 2y ago
I would say: absolutely no (ianal). But I've had stand up arguments with colleagues in the recent past that I was unable to win. They wouldn't even ask the legal team for an opinion. But it's nice to see some evidence here that I was correct.
ndiddy 2y ago
It's not required, but it's generally safer to put a notice saying who owns the copyright and what license the file is released under at the top of each file. Some licenses like MIT, the BSD licenses, Zlib, etc are short enough that you can include the full license text in the notice, and others like GPL provide sample copyright header text to include. Here's an example of this from a random file in the SDL source code: https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/blob/main/src/video/SDL_blit.c https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/blob/main/src/video/SDL_bl... Obviously Microsoft is still committing copyright infringement and in the wrong here. However, if the author had copyright notices in each file and then Microsoft stripped them out or changed the copyright information, it would make it harder for them to brush it off with "oops, we forgot to commit the correct LICENSE file" like I'm sure they'll do here.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

ryao 2y ago

It is a fairly standard practice in at least some open source communities to add copyright notices to files that people have changed significantly, although there is no well defined minimum threshold for how much permits them to add a copyright notice. Thus, someone else can come along, fork the project, add copyright notices to all of the files and then give the impression that they wrote them, since there is no attribution aside from the one LICENSE file that you wrote. The git history might show the truth, but if they copy the files into a fresh git repository, that metadata will be lost. Projects take files from one another all the time, so there is no guarantee that they will preserve your commit history and then anyone curious who wrote the code needs to do digital archaeology. That said, file level copyright notices are not perfect (since only the VCS shows who added what lines and that might not be preserved), but it is better than nothing and it is something that is guaranteed to persist as long as people are abiding by licenses. If they are not, that is copyright infringement and the copyright holder can do things like send cease and desist notices in response to the copyright notices being removed. Also, I must emphasize that I am not a lawyer, but one might argue that it was not willful infringement if someone removed a copyright notice from 1 file by claiming it had been a mistake. However, if they remove it from all files, then nobody is going to believe it was not willful.

johnisgood 2y ago
Thanks! I have some open source projects where I only have one LICENSE file (it is also in README), but I will consider adding it to all files, there are just too many files. :/ I am inconsistent, because I have projects that contain the copyright notice in all files.
- ryao 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - matkoniecz 2y ago
    Why you think that LLM-generated legal advise is worth posting on forum for humans?
    - DrammBA 2y ago
      > Why you think that LLM-generated legal advise is worth posting on forum for humans? Can you quote which part of the LLM chat above constitutes legal advice? I read the whole chat and didn't see any.
      - DrammBA 2y ago
        for reference this was the chat that allegedly contained legal advice: https://chatgpt.com/share/6806382f-7944-800f-95aa-8c770276237e https://chatgpt.com/share/6806382f-7944-800f-95aa-8c77027623...
        ryao 2y ago
        It does not. It simply discusses ways of adding headers to arbitrary source code. The intention is to add license and copyright headers, but the reality is that these headers can say anything. It is discussing generic techniques for doing this.
    - johnisgood 2y ago
      It is for inserting a copyright notice in the files, I will use a for loop and sed for it though. I'm old school. :P
    - ryao 2y ago

veltas 2y ago

Sufficient but a good idea to put copyright in all files. Technically if there's no license found then it should be considered automatically copyrighted, with no permissions to copy. So leaving copyright license out actually makes it less open source.

ryao 2y ago
The license does not necessarily need to be in the files. It could be a project level license in LICENSE, which is what the author here did.
- veltas 2y ago
  Yes that's exactly what I said :)
- dboreham 2y ago
  It's not the license that's important, but the copyright notice.
- frumplestlatz 2y ago
  It really should be in all files, not because it’s legally necessary, but because it’s the best way to ensure that the correct license/copyright follows the code to which it applies. Consider future contributions; the contributor’s copyright should apply only to the files to which they contributed. Similarly, consider any code that you incorporate from external sources; that code’s copyright and license should only apply to the files in which it has been incorporated. Lastly, consider the case where the code is copied out of your project to be incorporated in a different project. The license and copyright should follow with those files (and if your files don’t include copyright and license at the top, it’s very likely the person doing that copying will insert it themselves for this same reason).
  - ryao 2y ago
    I was responding to this: Sufficient but a good idea to put copyright in all files. Technically if there's no license found then it should be considered automatically copyrighted, with no permissions to copy. So leaving copyright license out actually makes it less open source. I said it is not legally necessary to have that in every file in the previous comment solely to contradict the idea that his project level LICENSE file did not constitute a license for the individual files. I did not at any time suggest that it was not a good idea to put notices in every file. In fact, if you look at my other comments, you will see that I said that he should have put copyright notices into every file multiple times. I even said it at the root of this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43750850 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43750850

dboreham 2y ago

I would say: absolutely no (ianal). But I've had stand up arguments with colleagues in the recent past that I was unable to win. They wouldn't even ask the legal team for an opinion. But it's nice to see some evidence here that I was correct.

ndiddy 2y ago

It's not required, but it's generally safer to put a notice saying who owns the copyright and what license the file is released under at the top of each file. Some licenses like MIT, the BSD licenses, Zlib, etc are short enough that you can include the full license text in the notice, and others like GPL provide sample copyright header text to include. Here's an example of this from a random file in the SDL source code: https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/blob/main/src/video/SDL_blit.c https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/blob/main/src/video/SDL_bl... Obviously Microsoft is still committing copyright infringement and in the wrong here. However, if the author had copyright notices in each file and then Microsoft stripped them out or changed the copyright information, it would make it harder for them to brush it off with "oops, we forgot to commit the correct LICENSE file" like I'm sure they'll do here.

deleted 2y ago
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