Installing 'update-copyright' on PQM

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

JAM writes:

 >   b) One could argue to lawyers that the act of merging changes in a
 >      given year, should cause a copyright update in that year.
 >      (Aggregation into a larger work seems an act of development to me.)

That is correct.  The earlier copyright should also be added, if
missing.  However, ISTR that when Emacs went on a copyright updating
tear a while back, RMS's lawyers told him it was basically OK to put
the earliest and latest years into the Copyright notice, as (in the
U.S. at least) the copyright notice is no longer legally required to
enforce copyright, and so is now informative (ie, a courtesy to
would-be users of the public domain) rather than normative.  Not that
any of us will live long enough to ever see a software copyright that
is still useful expire in the U.S. ;-)

 >    a) It is very common to copy a Copyright header from another file
 >       into a brand new file. Suddenly that new file claims to be
 >       copyrighted since 5 years ago.

If it comes with copyrightable text from that other file, it is
correct.

 > Also consider that we recently changed all of the GPL copyright stanzas
 > to include the new FSF address, and we also changed a huge number of
 > files to strip trailing whitespace. Should those changes also be omitted
 > from a Copyright year update?

The FSF address change is not expressive, there's essentially only one
way to do it, so it should be omitted.  The trailing whitespace change
is pure expression (it has no semantic meaning ;-).  On second
thought, though, it's hardly an original way to say nothing, so I
guess it's not copyrightable.

IANAL, etc.  You should check with yours.