Extended the COPYRIGHT property on FILENAME to allow for multiple successive copyright owners.

[MattHeffron]

If the COPYRIGHT property on the FILENAME is a LIST of multiple ("owner" year1 year2 ...), then print all of the dates & owners on separate lines.
The Owner entries MUST be chronologically ascending.
The year1 of T still gives the extra notification, and reports the EARLIEST year as the creation.

[masinter]

i'm not sure about this. The 'copyright' feature was never legally reviewed, it was done as an ad-hoc feature. We had a brief (pro bono) consultation with a lawyer who suggested several possibilities, ranging from copyright (c) Interlisp.org or removing copyright and license information from the source code leaving a reference to the repository LICENSE statement.
I previously had introduced a new value for COPYRIGHTFLG of IL:NEVER: if IL:COPYRIGHTFLG is IL:NEVER then ignore prior copyright assertions.

Anyway, I'd like to hold off merging this in, at least for a while, with the hopes we could get more clarity on copyright notices.

I suppose we should more strongly encourage setting COPYRIGHTFLG to NEVER.

[MattHeffron]

I'm not concerned with Copyright notices for the Medley (and Lispusers) files, per se.
This code is for the cases of resurrection of development of old Medley applications where the Copyright owner has changed name, or ownership has been transferred (which I'm hoping to accomplish with my old Beckman Instruments Expert System applications, so I'm kind of jumping the gun here).
I could, instead, make a Lispusers file which just replaces these two functions in PRETTY so that the core Medley code isn't changed.
Do you think that would be a better path?

[masinter]

But the copyright owners were something like 1984-1990 Xerox 1999 Venue 2018 Ron Kaplan 2023-24 Interlisp.org. Rather than making auto-generation of (legally dubious) copyright and license statements to make it simpler. Oh, like a file property you can set to point people to the LICENSE statement.

[masinter]

If there's a need for this, I'd prefer it to not disturb the copyright property: by allowing the COPYRIGHT property to include a string.

[masinter]

closed by mistake