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joshtriplettjoshtriplett
committedJul 26, 2017
LICENSE-MIT: Remove inaccurate (misattributed) copyright notice
LICENSE-MIT contains the line "Copyright (c) 2015 The Rust Project Developers", which implies that an entity called "The Rust Project Developers" holds copyrights in Rust. Rust contributors retain their copyrights, and do not assign them to anyone by contributing. Remove the inaccurate notice.
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‎LICENSE-MIT

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Copyright (c) 2010 The Rust Project Developers
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Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any
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person obtaining a copy of this software and associated
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documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the

8 commit comments

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 (8)

gurry commented on Apr 2, 2018

@gurry
gurry
on Apr 2, 2018
Contributor

The text still says "above copyright notice" referring to a non-existent notice. Should this also be removed?

joshtriplett commented on Apr 2, 2018

@joshtriplett
joshtriplett
on Apr 2, 2018
MemberAuthor

Editing the text of the license itself would be a Bad Idea. I don't think this is an issue.

gurry commented on Apr 2, 2018

@gurry
gurry
on Apr 2, 2018
Contributor

But is it legally coherent now when the text refers to a non-existent entity? I'm trying to use some code form rustlang in my own crate, and I'm not sure if referring to the missing copyright notices in my own reproduction of the text will perpetuate this anomaly further or not.

joshtriplett commented on Apr 3, 2018

@joshtriplett
joshtriplett
on Apr 3, 2018
MemberAuthor

Intent matters, and people will interpret "the above copyright notice and this permission notice" as "preserve this whole file verbatim".

gurry commented on Apr 3, 2018

@gurry
gurry
on Apr 3, 2018
Contributor

I understand what you mean, but I'm presuming legal language needs to be semantically correct in order to be binding. So the question is, does this small kink render the whole license legally unenforceable and, because of that, completely useless. Maybe a lawyer needs to be consulted about this.

Please see this discussion also: https://users.rust-lang.org/t/is-it-okay-to-copy-paste-code-from-rustlang/16576

joshtriplett commented on Apr 3, 2018

@joshtriplett
joshtriplett
on Apr 3, 2018
MemberAuthor

I'm not a lawyer nor am I offering legal advice. However, I do work with FOSS licenses and their interpretation/compatibility/etc professionally. And I would accept this myself without even the slightest hiccup.

As a general rule, things like that don't render whole licenses unenforceable or useless, they're just interpreted in the way that makes the most sense.

gurry commented on Apr 3, 2018

@gurry
gurry
on Apr 3, 2018
Contributor

Okay. Makes sense Josh. If you have experience with this stuff and it doesn't cause problems in practice, then it's fine. I'll go ahead and comply with this license as it is in my own crate (see linked discussion). Thanks :)

tangyandfresh commented on Oct 29, 2023

@tangyandfresh
tangyandfresh
on Oct 29, 2023

It's true that copyright notices aren't required to assert copyright and they're mostly informative.

However, in this particular case, the licence (MIT) specifically requires that the copyright notice be preserved. This commit has violated the terms of the licence.

Common wisdom about copyright notices doesn't apply here. One could imagine a hypothetical licence that requires each copy of the program to include the following string of text: "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog". It doesn't matter that this phrase has no special legal meaning. It just needs to be included.

Side note: There's actually a real-life licence that requires distributors to preserve completely arbitrary strings of text: GNU Free Documentation License, it calls these strings "Invariant Sections".

Also, it's not true that copyright notices can only name legal entities. For example, it's very common to put "and contributors" in there.

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