[legal-discuss] Need for "All rights reserved" in source files ?

Daniel P. Berrange berrange at redhat.com
Tue May 27 12:47:58 UTC 2014


In the Nova codebase (and presumably other openstack projects) there
is often a statement

   "All rights reserved"

placed on the same line as, or line immediately following, a company's
"Copyright" statement. This is not at all consistently applied, eg
in Nova, 704 files have 'All rights reserved' but 539 files do not
have it:

  $ git grep --files-with-matches -i 'All rights reserved'  -- '*.py' | wc -l
  704

  $ git grep --files-without-match -i 'All rights reserved'  -- '*.py' | wc -l
  539

When there are multiple 'Copyright XYZ Corp' lines in the source file
header, it isn't entirely clear to whose copyright declaration the
'All rights reserved' statement applies - the one before, the one
after, all coyright declarations, or something else...

Is there any current legal reason why 'All rights reserved' is needed in
source files ? I'm been under the impression this statement is obsolete

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_rights_reserved#Obsolescence

Is saying "All rights reserved" even relevant when we have placed the
file under the Apache license ? The combo of the 'Copyright XYZ Corp'
and the Apache license header should be sufficient to express the
copyright status of any source file surely.

So I'm wondering if there is any legal reason that prevents us removing
the 'All rights reserved' statements from the source files in Nova, and
any projects who wish to do a similar cleanup ?

Regards,
Daniel
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