Re: updating copyright years

[Joel E. Denny]

On Tue, 4 Aug 2009, Karl Berry wrote:

>     > Given that (IIRC) "(C)" has no legal meaning, isn't this ("Copyright" 
> with no
>     > "(C)") the preferred form?
> 
>     It's recommended by the GNU coding standards and GNU maintainers 
>     documentation.
> 
> The (C) is neither recommended nor disrecommended, though I admit most
> of the examples (written umpteen years ago) include it.

The GNU maintainers documentation says:

  A copyright notice looks like this:

     Copyright (C) year1, year2, year3  copyright-holder

and later says

  However, stick with parenthesized ‘C’ unless you know that C-in-a-circle 
  will work.

I suppose that statement is intended to mean simply that you shouldn't use 
C-in-a-circle if it's not supported, but I saw no hint that omitting them 
altogether is acceptable.  It might be nice to adjust this wording to 
facilitate future conversations like this one.

So, the consensus is that we should make (C) completely optional?  I'm a 
little worried that this increases the changes of update-copyright 
matching incorrect text.