On 10/5/20 8:02 AM, Greg KH wrote: > On Mon, Oct 05, 2020 at 05:23:45PM +0300, Jarkko Sakkinen wrote: >> [*] One thing I've been wondering for a long time is that, why new code >> should have the copyright platters in the first place? I get it for >> pre-Git era but now there is a cryptographic log of authority. > Go talk to your corporate lawyers about this, it is one of the most > common cargo-cult patterns around :) For this patch, though, it seems like we should just update the dates instead of removing them. If I look at the last 1000 "^+.*Copyright" lines added to the kernel, 997 of them have a year. So, weird or not, it's a pretty standard convention. We'd need a slightly more broad conversation before we decide to nix these dates. Pure speculation: Copyright protection, at least in the US, is not forever. I _think_ it's 75 years or something. That protection starts when the work is created and is independent of when it gets merged into Linux. So, if we did something weird like merge a driver written 10 years ago, it would only be protected for 65 more years after we merge it. In other words, git history _might_ be irrelevant for copyright protection.
