536336 - Remove copyright strings in UI

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

Attachment: Fix v.1

We have multiple localized and non-localized copyright statements of the form "© 1998-2010 Contributors" (or "(c)" or strangely "mozilla.org"), which appear when you use Get Info on the app bundle on OS X, or Properties on the application on Windows, and in the About dialog (separately, twice, in the first pane and for a few seconds at the end of the credits crawl), and in the URL about:, and on the default welcome page in the help viewer (which isn't used by any product shipping the help viewer, as far as I know), as well as several which aren't visible anywhere at all, that I'm removing in bug 536327.

Updating them is a yearly source of pain and drama, because we always update them for en-US on all shipping branches, and people first object to changing them on branches (bug 322172, bug 407635, bug 536124) and then people object to them not being changed in their locale on branches, because by policy we don't accept updates to locales other than en-US. Failing to update them makes us look sloppy and inattentive (we haven't shipped en-US without the current year since I've been around, so I could only point to the bugs filed on non-en-US locales to demonstrate that, but apparently we plan on shipping at least 3.5.7 and 3.0.17 in January with "1998 - 2009", and it's not entirely clear to me, but perhaps we also plan on shipping 3.6 that way, so I expect that shortly I'll have dozens of duplicate bugs on en-US to point out, too).

As any internet lawyer whose legal training consists of a few hours of searching Google can tell you, dates in copyright statements are a feature of the Universal Copyright Convention, and no claim of copyright at all is required for Berne Convention coverage. That should mean that we only need to specify dates if we are expecting to pursue a copyright claim in Andorra, Laos, Saudi Arabia, Turkmenistan or Uzbekistan, which have UCC coverage but not Berne coverage. That's just silly - the hypothetical benefit of that is far outweighed by the actual annoyance of fighting to make the change, and then telling people who don't speak English that it's just too bad, we aren't going to bother making their program not look out of date and ignored.

There are a number of other possible legal opinions, none of which call for what we are doing:

* it could be that we care about pursuing a claim in Laos, and that the date must be a range which includes the last year in which any change was made (I was completely unable to find word one about using date ranges in UCC claims), in which case we must stop refusing to allow updates to non-en-US, and must instead insist that they be made before we ship any locale in a new year

* it could be that we care about pursuing a claim in Andorra, but that the date range must only include the last year in which "substantial" changes were made, in which case we should stop changing en-US on stable branches

* it could be the case that date ranges are just something made up by people with no actual legal advice, in which case we should just change them to 1998 and then leave them alone

Gavin: while I of course want to hear your non-code thoughts, I'm not expecting a legal opinion from you, just a code opinion - I won't go anywhere unless and until I get a response from Harvey.

Harvey: I slipped one more bit of internet lawyering in, because the first pane of the About dialog doubles up with not only a UCC date, but also a pair of Buenos Aires Convention "all rights reserved" (including one attempting to apply Buenos Aires to trademark), currently reading "© 1998-2010 Contributors. All rights reserved. (Licensing information). Firefox and the Firefox logos are trademarks of the Mozilla Foundation. All rights reserved." Since Buenos Aires is dead, and I was touching the localized string in a way that will make every localization team redo it, I chopped out that first "All rights reserved" - it's not true, has no legal meaning anymore, and is not at all the tone we're trying for, but it would be a lot more work for everyone, particularly localizers, to remove it separately.

Comment 1

[harvey anderson]

Thanks for trying to clean this up. Removing "All Rights Reserved" is good.
Let me look at the other proposals.

Comment 2

[harvey anderson]

Regarding the copyright notices, Phil's right. It would be duplicative to restate the arguments above - but in short, they're not really needed. The past practice was to include them to assist against the innocent infringer defenses, but the benefit is marginal.

In addition, the notice regarding contributors is unlikely to meet legal requirement because it doesn't provide a recognizable name. 

Given the additional work required to maintain them and the limited value, recommend we remove the copyright notices excluding requirements of 3rd party license.

Comment 3

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

Comment on attachment 418797 [details] [diff] [review]
Fix v.1

Wups, forgot to obsolete this. "Just remove them" was the same conclusion I was already coming around to because of the "recognizable name" thing (though sometimes we make it recognizable by lying about the names, linking it to about:credits even though that's a list of some, but not all, of the copyright holders plus some people who are not copyright holders). Mostly it's straightforward enough, but sorting out the one at the end of the credits crawl, which was supposed to be the one true cross-app one, but has mostly just become redundant or broken or both, isn't going to be quite so easy.

Comment 4

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

Attachment: Thusly?

Truly dependent on bug 537045 and bug 537066 to make license.dtd unused and removable.

Comment 5

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

Comment on attachment 419473 [details] [diff] [review]
Thusly?

>diff --git a/browser/locales/en-US/chrome/browser/aboutDialog.dtd b/browser/locales/en-US/chrome/browser/aboutDialog.dtd

>-<!ENTITY copyrightInfo1             "&#169;1998-2010 Contributors. All rights reserved. (">
>+<!ENTITY licenseInfo1               "">

>-<!ENTITY copyrightInfo2             ").">
>+<!ENTITY licenseInfo2               ".">

Can we take this opportunity to simplify and remove the prefix/suffix strings, given that this is now just a plain link? I suppose it might be simpler to leave it...

Comment 6

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

I filed bug 541791 while reviewing, maybe you can throw that change in your queue to avoid someone bitrotting you? :)

Comment 7

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

Attachment: Compromise

Pretty sure we can do without licenseInfo1, and while I was touching it again I moved the space out of the XUL and into logoTrademark where it belongs, but I think I'd rather not move the full stop into licenseLinkText - more churn, makes it linked, which would maybe be nicer on OS X where we focus the link even though we wish we didn't, but generally isn't the right thing to do, and feels like it would make people more likely to look at an unbranded build, say "huh, it's just a couple of words all alone, why would I put a full stop there?" and then find out post-shipping that they have a run-on "Licensing information Firefox and the Firefox logos..." in branded builds.

Comment 8

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/90b4886e734a

Comment 9

[u88484]

Verified fixed using the latest trunk build:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.3a1pre) Gecko/20100126 Minefield/3.7a1pre

Comment 10

[philippe (part-time)]

Did this cause the layout of the about window to break on OS X ? I filed bug 544390 for this.