[License-discuss] MIT-Clone: Copyright notice

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Jasper Horn (jasperhorn at gmail.com):

> What do you people think about this?

Since you ask:  IMO, the optimal solution to your problem is to cease
obsessing over MIT License copyright notices -- which are in the short term 
doing no harm and over the long term will tend to do positive good (by 
furnishing recipients the names of legal stakeholders who, at least as
of a particular (specified: see below) date, owned a copyright encumbrance).  

One of the recurring trends in recent years on OSI license-discuss has
involved people deciding they dislike copyright notices for short
permissive licences, pointing out that copyright law doesn't require
them (true), and for various IMO bad reasons seeking to drop them.  I
recognise that said school of thought exists; I don't think it should be
encouraged.

And, by the way, although nothing in copyright law requires you to use
the formulation 'Copyright 2020 Joe Coder' and prevents you from saying
'Created in 2020 by Joe Coder', your avoidance of the word 'copyright' 
has no effect on the legal reality of title arising and vesting
instantaneously whenever someone puts a creative work in one of the
covered categories, or an improvement to such a work, into fixed form.
So, the reason you should continue to call a copyright notice a
copyright notice rather than an attribution notice is that the former is 
_what it really is_.

So, I'd really strongly suggest that you appreciate the merits of MIT
Licence exactly the way it is, and not seek to create a semi-clone with
unwise modifications made for unwise reasons.

-- 
Cheers,                     "Why doesn't anyone invite copyeditors to parties,
Rick Moen                   when we're such cool people out with whom to hang?"
rick at linuxmafia.com                        -- @laureneoneal (Lauren O'Neal)
McQ! (4x80)