Re: [Gnash-dev] updating the copyright date

[olafBuddenhagen]

Hi,

On Sun, Jan 30, 2011 at 10:04:40AM -0700, Rob Savoye wrote:

> Now that New Year's has passed, we have to update the copyright date
> in all of the GPL'd Gnash files.

I was thinking again about the questionable "update all copyright years
just because" practice. I remembered what the copyright years are about
-- and why changing the years without a code changes is really WRONG:
The purpose of stating the years is to see when copyright will *expire*
-- which clearly depends on the latest actual change.

(Admittedly, that's quite irrelevant in practice nowadays due to
Disney's intervention; and in fact for software, terms of several
decades are completely meaningless anyways... But apparently it's still
necessary to state the correct dates for legal reasons.)

-antrik-