[tlp-interest] Re: Question about listing copyright years in an RFC at publication time

[Brian E Carpenter <[e-mail]>]

On 25-Dec-25 16:17, John Levine wrote:
> It appears that Lynne Bartholomew  <[e-mail]> said:
>>    /* Copyright (c) 2016-2025 IETF Trust and the persons
>>     * identified as authors of the code.  All rights reserved.
>>     * See fnv-private.h for terms of use and redistribution.
>>     */
> 
>> Should "2016-2025" be changed to "2016-2026" at that time, or left as it is currently?
> 
> Keeping in mind that I am definitely not your lawyer, my understanding is that
> the copyright date is when a work was first fixed in tangible form, and it can
> often be earlier than the date of publication.

It used to be common practice for scientific articles to show a "Received"
date as well as a publication date, back when publication delays were often
a year or two. I think the reason for this was more to establish precedence
than copyright, but the argument is the same.

One famous example is Claude Shannon's "Communication in the Presence of Noise",
manuscript received July 23, 1940, published in the Proceedings of the I.R.E.
in January 1949.

So I agree with John, I don't think it needs changing. Of course, if the
authors wanted to *change* the code during AUTH48, it would be different.

Rgds
    Brian

> 
> In our case I'd think that publishing an I-D is fixed and tangible, and I
> presume that I-D was from 2025, so I would leave the notice alone.
> 
> In practice it makes no difference since copyright terms are now so long that we
> will all be long dead before the copyright on the document expires either way.
> 
> R's,
> John
> 
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