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Comment by johnisgood | Hacker News Reader

> but you never put copyright notices in your files.

I thought having a LICENSE file in the project's root directory was sufficient. Is it not the case?

It is a fairly standard practice in at least some open source communities to add copyright notices to files that people have changed significantly, although there is no well defined minimum threshold for how much permits them to add a copyright notice. Thus, someone else can come along, fork the project, add copyright notices to all of the files and then give the impression that they wrote them, since there is no attribution aside from the one LICENSE file that you wrote. The git history might show the truth, but if they copy the files into a fresh git repository, that metadata will be lost. Projects take files from one another all the time, so there is no guarantee that they will preserve your commit history and then anyone curious who wrote the code needs to do digital archaeology.

That said, file level copyright notices are not perfect (since only the VCS shows who added what lines and that might not be preserved), but it is better than nothing and it is something that is guaranteed to persist as long as people are abiding by licenses. If they are not, that is copyright infringement and the copyright holder can do things like send cease and desist notices in response to the copyright notices being removed.

Also, I must emphasize that I am not a lawyer, but one might argue that it was not willful infringement if someone removed a copyright notice from 1 file by claiming it had been a mistake. However, if they remove it from all files, then nobody is going to believe it was not willful.

Thanks! I have some open source projects where I only have one LICENSE file (it is also in README), but I will consider adding it to all files, there are just too many files. :/ I am inconsistent, because I have projects that contain the copyright notice in all files.

Sufficient but a good idea to put copyright in all files.

Technically if there's no license found then it should be considered automatically copyrighted, with no permissions to copy. So leaving copyright license out actually makes it less open source.

The license does not necessarily need to be in the files. It could be a project level license in LICENSE, which is what the author here did.

Yes that's exactly what I said :)

It's not the license that's important, but the copyright notice.

It really should be in all files, not because it’s legally necessary, but because it’s the best way to ensure that the correct license/copyright follows the code to which it applies.

Consider future contributions; the contributor’s copyright should apply only to the files to which they contributed.

Similarly, consider any code that you incorporate from external sources; that code’s copyright and license should only apply to the files in which it has been incorporated.

Lastly, consider the case where the code is copied out of your project to be incorporated in a different project. The license and copyright should follow with those files (and if your files don’t include copyright and license at the top, it’s very likely the person doing that copying will insert it themselves for this same reason).

I was responding to this:

  Sufficient but a good idea to put copyright in all files.
  
  Technically if there's no license found then it should be considered automatically copyrighted, with no permissions to copy. So leaving copyright license out actually makes it less open source.

I said it is not legally necessary to have that in every file in the previous comment solely to contradict the idea that his project level LICENSE file did not constitute a license for the individual files. I did not at any time suggest that it was not a good idea to put notices in every file. In fact, if you look at my other comments, you will see that I said that he should have put copyright notices into every file multiple times. I even said it at the root of this thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43750850

It's not required, but it's generally safer to put a notice saying who owns the copyright and what license the file is released under at the top of each file. Some licenses like MIT, the BSD licenses, Zlib, etc are short enough that you can include the full license text in the notice, and others like GPL provide sample copyright header text to include. Here's an example of this from a random file in the SDL source code: https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/blob/main/src/video/SDL_bl...

Obviously Microsoft is still committing copyright infringement and in the wrong here. However, if the author had copyright notices in each file and then Microsoft stripped them out or changed the copyright information, it would make it harder for them to brush it off with "oops, we forgot to commit the correct LICENSE file" like I'm sure they'll do here.

I would say: absolutely no (ianal). But I've had stand up arguments with colleagues in the recent past that I was unable to win. They wouldn't even ask the legal team for an opinion. But it's nice to see some evidence here that I was correct.

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