XfceAboutDialog

[Brian J. Tarricone]

Erik Harrison wrote:

>On Thu, 03 Feb 2005 21:12:14 -0800, Brian J. Tarricone
><bjt23 at cornell.edu> wrote:
>  
>
>>hmm, so i was just looking our about dialog widget, and something
>>occurred to me.  the bottom of the 1st tab, it has "All rights
>>reserved."  not really sure why that's there, since it implies very
>>strict licensing terms - that is, that you're reserving all your
>>copyright rights to yourself.  kinda contradictory to the GPL/BSD/etc.
>>anyone have any objections if i remove it?
>>    
>>
>
>I'm not saying you should or shouldn't, but all rights reserved
>essentially means, at least in the US "Not in the public domain, see
>owner for licencing". That licence is of course GPL/BSD/MIT. Even BSD
>licence without advertising clause is a licence, of sorts
>  
>
so i did a little more research, and it does appear that "all rights 
reserved" is more of an assertion of "hey, this is copyrighted, got it?" 
than anything else.  however, it appears that it's redundant, 
unnecessary, and useless:

The correct form for a notice is:

"Copyright [dates] by [author/owner]"

You can use C in a circle © instead of "Copyright" but "(C)" has never 
been given legal force. The phrase "All Rights Reserved" used to be 
required in some nations but is now not legally needed most places. In 
some countries it may help preserve some of the "moral rights."

this is from:
http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html
it's written by brad templeton, chairman of the EFF, so i tend to think 
he probably knows what he's talking about ^_~.

i also found this:
http://homepages.tesco.net/~J.deBoynePollard/FGA/law-copyright-all-rights-reserved.html
which is a bit more in depth.  in short: it seems that the "all rights 
reserved" legend was only necessary for participants of the buenos aires 
copyright convention of 1910, which only consists of some nations in 
north and south america (i.e., nobody in europe).  even then, the BA 
convention is totally superceded by the berne copyright convention of 
1971 (which stated that everything is automatically copyrighted and 
there's no need to declare anything), as well as the universal copyright 
convention of 1971, which is there as a catch-all for countries where it 
*is* required to declare something.  in that case, what follows is what 
brad templeton says above: you need 1) the C-in-circle symbol, 2) your 
name, and 3) the year of first publication.

so, in closing, i assert the same thing, though for slightly different 
reasons: the "all rights reserved" line should be removed.  i guess my 
previous feeling was based on the fact that i've never seen it used on a 
free software project before, but only on stuff with more restrictive 
protections, like proprietary software, music, movies, and books (of the 
dead-tree variety).

    -b