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Comment by misnome | Hacker News Reader

Why on earth have they done:

Rather than just

This is why: "For software with several releases over multiple years, it's okay to use a range (“2008-2010”) instead of listing individual years (“2008, 2009, 2010”) if and only if every year in the range, inclusive, really is a “copyrightable” year that would be listed individually; and you make an explicit statement in your documentation about this usage."

Source: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.en.html

Every year from 2001 to 2017 inclusive is listed so this is not the reason.

Sure, in this particular file every year in the interval is listed, but in a large codebase that's not always the case. Always listing every year keeps things simple, consistent, avoids complications around extra statement and clauses, and makes auto-generating headers easier.

Can anyone point me to a resource of the advantages of including copyright dates? I've worked with IP lawyers who consider them to be legally useless. Copyright is applied to a work upon creation and expires n years after the death of the developer. The year of creation has nothing to do with copyright, unless you're trying to prove who created the work, but a year in the copyright notice is a poor way to do this.

I believe if the work is a "work for hire" (i.e. you were paid by a company to do it instead of doing it for yourself) then the timer for copyright expiry starts on the date the work was put into a tangible medium (rather than after the author's death). So assuming some Python developers do that work on company time, then those copyrights are owned by the company and it is legally relevant to include the year.

Oh sorry, you're right. I had my mind in individual hobbyist software projects. For a project with as many contributors as Python, the copyright date should definitely be listed to avoid trying to contact the developers (most of which will be long gone) for the date of creation once you believe the copyright has expired.

A couple of technical reasons might be: ensuring that you can "grep" for any 4-digit year and find applicable files; or, that a "diff" makes it more obvious what is being added.

I prefer ranges personally. Also, I believe only the year of first publication is technically required anyway.

> Also, I believe only the year of first publication is technically required anyway.

Surely adding later years must have the effect of pushing the copyright expiration date?

Not sure about US law, but in Australia, Copyright notices are not required at all, they're granted automatically under the law and only serve as a reminder -- so it's irrelevant.

Since 1989, you also don't need copyright notices in the US

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention

;)

You don't even have to put the dates at all. Copyright notices with dates are stupid, especially when they're in every file and require you to touch every file yearly to update them.

You don't even have to have a copyright notice at all.

IANAL, TINLA

Perhaps because explicit is better than implicit.

OT but why do you need to state any year at all?

I'm not sure why, but I've seen this elsewhere - in particular I think it's FSF policy to number every year individually.

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