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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 the
by 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 agoThanks! 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 agoWhy 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 agofor 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 agoIt 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 agoIt 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 agoIt is advice for how to add headers to source files, not legal advice. This is a generic concept and the headers could literally say anything. They just happen to be license and copyright notices, since that is what he needs them to be. It is easier than opening each file in a text editor to manually add the header.