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Comment by hyperman1 | Hacker News Reader

This was confusing, the actual article is after a big 'quote' from Microsoft. The meat of the article is:

  Linux Foundation lawyers are now literally recommending omitting copyright holders’ names and copyright dates from copyright notices in source code. Why would a lawyer recommend something so dumb? This is an obvious attempt to try to hinder GPL enforcement

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I'll try to make sense of this.

Most of these pertain to allowing others to use the copyrighted work, e.g. licensing. In a work for hire, the author (natural person) assigns this to whoever hired him (e.g. his employer)

But in Europe (but, I believe, not in the USA), there is a non-transferable moral right on fathership (rough translation for vaderschapsrecht), the right to let the world know that you wrote the code. This right cannot be assigned to someone else. So if a European employee works for Microsoft, and writes a driver for Linux, the employee probably has the right to require his name to appear in the copyright message.

It seems this article tells authors to not claim this right and remain anonymous.

How this hinders GPL enforcement isn't clear to me. It might muddy the waters about who owns the code right now, hence removing standing - You can't generally sue someone for infringing a copyright that is not yours, the current owner has to sue.

Update: The source is this: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/2020/01/copyright-notic...

And there is some interesting stuff under : Why not list every copyright holder?

It seems very strange to me that a lawyer writes this:

  The specific individual or legal entity that owns the copyright might not be known to the contributor; it could be you, your employer, or some other entity.

He considers it acceptable to contribute even if the actual ownership is not clear. If you don't know who owns a contribution, how can the owner agree to contribute?

I believe the quote/screenshot is from Linux Foundation. But yes, confusing. And no actual argument or discussion of the problem.

I honestly don't see what the harm is supposed to be. What is the purported effect of a broader attribution in the copyright header?

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