<div dir="auto"><div>Hi Josh,</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">I may not have been clear. I am not objecting to file level notices as a practical approach to documentation.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Those are common and useful, and as you said licenses like Apache 2.0 make good use of them. My point is narrower.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">What I was reacting to was the idea that a file level label could reliably determine something like "this file is fully AI generated and therefore public domain." That moves from documentation into making a legal conclusion about authorship based on the boundary of a file. In otherwords, files are convenient implementation artifacts, but they are not reliable boundaries for authorship. A given module may span multiple files, or a single file may reflect design decisions, prompts, surrounding code context, and integration work that occurred elsewhere in the repository. In that sense the authorship of a portion of code often comes from the development process and the structure of the larger work, not just the literal text inside a particular file.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">So my concern is less about file level attribution itself and more about using file boundaries as the basis for determining the copyright status of a portion of the work. </div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Josh</div><div><br></div><div data-smartmail="gmail_signature"><br>Joshua Gay<br>Sr. Manager SA Open Source Community & Infrastructure<br><a href="https://saopen.ieee.org">https://saopen.ieee.org</a><br>m: +1 617.966.9792<br>meet: <a href="https://calendly.com/jgay-ieee">https://calendly.com/jgay-ieee</a></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Sun, Mar 15, 2026, 3:05\u202fPM Josh Berkus <<a href="mailto:josh@berkus.org">josh@berkus.org</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">On 3/14/26 9:36 AM, Joshua Gay via License-review wrote:<br>
> On file level rules<br>
> <br>
> Relatedly, framing authorship and licensing at the level of individual <br>
> files does not reflect how software authorship actually works. Files are <br>
> implementation artifacts, not reliable boundaries of authorship nor even <br>
> a reliable way to distinguish between modular components of a work.<br>
> <br>
> A "file" in the context of software is a helpful metaphor for computer <br>
> users but not a useful way to discuss a literary work in a legal sense.<br>
<br>
File-level attribution is a common approach across many popular open <br>
source licenses, including the APL2.0, one of the top three most used <br>
licenses in the catalog.<br>
<br>
If you have a better approach for "distinguishing between modular <br>
components of a work", please share it, because it hasn't appeared in <br>
any accepted license yet.<br>
<br>
-- <br>
Josh Berkus<br>
<br>
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