Website Engine - Footer Note

[Laurence Finston]

On Sat, 23 Oct 2004, Roland [iso-8859-15] Häder wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I'm developing a website's engine which is based on PHP4 and MySQL which
> I have licensed under the GNU GPL Version 2. I currently use this note:
>
> ----- snip: -----
> Foobar-Program v1.2.3
> © 2003 - 2004 by MyDomain.org. All Rights Reserved.
>
> Website engine's code is © copyleft by Foobar. Foobar is a free software
> released under the GNU GPL v2
>
> ----- snap: -----
>
> Is this fine?Or shall I better rewrite the first line to my name and not
> to my domain?

No, it's not fine.

1.  A legal entity (_juristische Person_) such as an
individual, a company, a university or a publisher can hold a copyright,
but I don't think a domain can.  Even if it could, I don't think it would
be a good idea to make it the copyright holder, because its name is
more likely to change than that of a person, etc.

2.  The clause "All Rights Reserved" violates both the letter
and the spirit of the GPL.

3.  Years should be separated by commas, not dashes.
A proper copyright notice looks like this:
Copyright (C) 2003, 2004 John W. Smith
It's best not to use the copyright symbol, because it may not be
representable on all terminals.

The text of the GPL includes instructions on how to use it for your
software, including what notices you should put in your source files.

Laurence Finston
GNU 3DLDF maintainer