Copyright year set to initial

[prayagverma]

According to http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ01.pdf (See screenshot of relevant section below) , listing the first year of publication in the copyright is enough

The commits d5c8f62 and f979f91 have changed the copyright years

This commit reverts back those changes, so that license year is again 2014 (As it was, when this license was first introduced in commit 90ba013 )

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Edit 1: Added screenshot

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[durka]

cc #30665

[alexcrichton]

r? @brson

[brson]

The relevant section is under in the pdf is "Form of Notice for Visually Perceptible Copies". Based on it, it does look like we should write the year of first publication.

2014 isn't the year of first publication though. It's not even the year Rust was relicensed to MIT/Apache-2.0.

Should these maybe say 2010? Are there reasons we should keep these updated?

cc @rust-lang/core

[bors]

☔ The latest upstream changes (presumably #30958) made this pull request unmergeable. Please resolve the merge conflicts.

[brson]

@pra85 Please change the dates to 2010 and I'll r+. Thanks for your patience.

[prayagverma]

@brson I have changed the date to 2010

[jethrogb]

Do not merge this PR as is.

When you merge some changes into the code base, you have just made a derivative work of the original work (=the parent commit). As pointed out by point 2 of your excerpt, a derivative work needs to have the copyright year of initial publication of the derivative work. This is why you sometimes see aggregate copright notices on files, because different parts of the file were authored in different years.

In short this means that for every PR, you need to add to the copyright year of every file you change the current year. Perhaps we can have @bors check/do this automatically.

If you think the whole state of the Rust project after a particular commit is a derivative work of its parent commit, then the main copyright file should just have the year of the latest commit. If you think the Rust project consists of many individual works, each with different authorship dates, then the main copyright file should probably say something like © 2010-This year.

[brson]

As pointed out by point 2 of your excerpt, a derivative work needs to have the copyright year of initial publication of the derivative work

Interesting point.

In short this means that for every PR, you need to add to the copyright year of every file you change the current year

Though possibly true in a technical sense, we do not believe this to be the case in practice and actively discourage people from updating the copyright year. The advice we've received previously is that the copyright dates in the file headers have little legal weight beyond what is already established in the commit history.

Previous discussion. Here's the salient point: "the actual copyright status of the file is unaffected by what it says at the top, so people for whom it's actually important when the copyright expires (i.e. no-one) will have to do more research in any case."

By the logic of our previous decisions (which was in the context of file headers and not the blanket copyright notice) I still believe this is a reasonable course of action, but I'll ask around more.

[jethrogb]

the copyright dates in the file headers have little legal weight beyond what is already established in the commit history.

Certainly true.

people for whom it's actually important when the copyright expires (i.e. no-one)

I guess this makes sense because we basically grant all rights to everyone.

I'll ask around more.

Yes, please don't take my word (i.e. CS major who took some IP law classes) for it.

[aturon]

I've reached out to Mozilla's legal staff to get some advice on this issue. I'll post a follow-up comment as soon as I have information to share.

[aturon]

The response from Mozilla legal was that, while none of these notices are legally required, this PR is correct: if we have a copyright notice, it should reflect the year of original publication.

@bors: r+

[bors]

📌 Commit 8c96f37 has been approved by aturon

[aturon]

@bors: rollup