[legal-discuss] Copyright statements in _empty_ files

Monty Taylor mordred at inaugust.com
Wed May 15 13:53:14 UTC 2013


On 05/15/2013 06:51 AM, David Ripton wrote:
> I'm not generally advocating removing copyright statements from source
> files.  If the author(s) put them in, then it's (at least) rude to take
> them out without permission, and getting permission from thousands of
> contributors would be a pain.
> 
> But there's one particular case that drives me nuts.  We have source
> code files that contain _only_ a copyright statement, and no actual
> content to assert copyright over.  (I'm not talking about NOTICE files
> that exist to hold copyright statements; I'm talking about zero-byte
> __init__.py files that exist to mark a directory as a Python package.)
> You can't copyright a zero-byte file; there's no original creative
> content there.  And, because the copyright blurb makes the file's size
> nonzero, people waste time reading it to look for code.
> 
> Anyone object to me emptying source files that contain no code, just
> copyright statements and boilerplate vim/emacs comments?

I do not object to that.



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