Question on OSD #5

[Chris Travers]

On Nov 27, 2007 12:26 AM, David Woolley <forums at david-woolley.me.uk> wrote:

>
> I believe that "appropriate notices" doesn't allow anonymity because it
> would conflict with the known goals of enforceabilty and credibility.
> Only copyright owners (who may be assignees) can enforce, and
> credibility requires that you be able to know who owns the copyfights.
>

I did learn an interesting counterpoint today to this effect.
Apparently in the United States, it is possible to copyright a work
without revealing the author's legal name.
Hence, copright 2007 GeekMasterCoder might be possible.  The Copyright
Office considers disclosure of the author's legal name to be optional.

Is the requirement in the GPL more strict than this?
http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl101.html

I always figured that the major goal of the requirements of such
notices was so that the original author is protected against someone
claiming he wrote code that he didn't.
> --
> David Woolley
> Emails are not formal business letters, whatever businesses may want.
> RFC1855 says there should be an address here, but, in a world of spam,
> that is no longer good advice, as archive address hiding may not work.
>