On Saturday, January 31, 2026 2:44:42?AM Mountain Standard Time Ilu wrote:

Am 31.01.26 um 09:19 schrieb Arto Jantunen:

Jonathan Carter <jcc@debian.org> writes:

I agree with others that matching the package licensing is reasonable,
although as we often see, bigger and larger packages tend to have a
mixture of licenses, in which case we typically choose the most free
license for the package.

Occasionally, I run into problems with more advanced packages, and then
find that Arch Linux of Gentoo have found a good solution to it, and I

use

it. When I've already spent some hours to a packaging solution in Debian, >> I want it to be available as widely as possible to others in the same
manner with as little friction as possible. So, I think if I had to
default on something else that "same as packaging", I'd use something

like

CC0 or something that is equally permissive.

I recently thought about this specific problem for reasons I can't now remember, and arrived at the conclusion that CC0 is probably the best license one can choose for packaging.

For the most part the packaging is unlikely to be copyrightable anyway

^^ This.

so assigning a license that has restrictions only makes things harder
for the friendly folks who care about license compatibility and are unwilling to unilaterally decide that copyright doesn't apply.

Claiming copyright for something that is not copyright-able and then
even putting restrictions on its use can be legally dangerous. Although
it is a rare occurence, court cases have been lost in the past with
expensive consequences for the person who tried to put restrictions on content that was - for whatever reason - part of the commons/public domain/not copyrightable.

Potentially making things difficult for good free software citizens
without in any way affecting the not so friendly folks seems counterproductive to me.

From time to time I hear people make the argument that Debian packaging is not copyrightable. I personally disagree with that assessment. Among all the other possible factors for considering that packaging *is* copyrightable, I think the effort argument is the easiest to understand.
When I consider the hours and hours and hours it often takes to get the contents of debian/* into good shape for proper packaging, I think it is impossible to argue that so little effort is required, or that Debian packaging is such an obvious task, or that the results are just a set of default values that don?t represent any actual labor. That fact that Debian packaging done well requires so much effort, and that it takes so long for new packagers to become good at it, is a strong indication that it is copyrightable.
--
Soren Stoutner
soren@debian.org


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On Monday, February 2, 2026 11:43:34?AM Mountain Standard Time Jonas Smedegaard wrote:

Related to that, I now (since yesterday) add the following section to
the debian/copyright file of packages that I maintain:

Files: debian/patches/*
Copyright: None
License: None
Comment:
Patches are generally assumed not copyright-protected by default.
Please list any patch with copyright claims separately.

As I just wrote in a separate email, I disagree strongly with the idea that Debian packaging is not copyrightable. I do not think that any packages with the above debian/copyright entry should be allowed in Debian.
--
Soren Stoutner
soren@debian.org


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On 2026-02-02 11:01, Soren Stoutner wrote:

When I consider the hours and hours and hours it often takes to get the contents of debian/* into good shape for proper packaging, I think it is

impossible to argue that so little effort is required, or that Debian packaging is such an obvious task, or that the results are just a set of

default values that don?t represent any actual labor. That fact

that Debian

packaging done well requires so much effort, and that it takes so long fo

r new

packagers to become good at it, is a strong indication that it is copyrightable.

That. If Debian package were so trivial, that it can't even be
copyrighted, we can go out and party instead.

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.11
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]] Soren Stoutner

From time to time I hear people make the argument that Debian
packaging is not copyrightable. I personally disagree with that
assessment. Among all the other possible factors for considering that packaging *is* copyrightable, I think the effort argument is the
easiest to understand.

Depending on your jurisdiction, ®Effort¯, is not, as I understand
it,
relevant to whether something is copyrightable or not. It's not
relevant in the US (per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow#United_States), in the
EU you get concept like database rights (which I don't think are
particularly relevant to Debian packaging).

When I consider the hours and hours and hours it often takes to get
the contents of debian/* into good shape for proper packaging, I think
it is impossible to argue that so little effort is required, or that
Debian packaging is such an obvious task, or that the results are just
a set of default values that don?t represent any actual labor. T

hat

fact that Debian packaging done well requires so much effort, and that
it takes so long for new packagers to become good at it, is a strong indication that it is copyrightable.

Out of interest, do you think that the output of large language models
is copyrightable?

--
Tollef Fog Heen
UNIX is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.11
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On Monday, February 2, 2026 2:19:30?PM Mountain Standard Time Tollef Fog Heen wrote:

]] Soren Stoutner

From time to time I hear people make the argument that Debian
packaging is not copyrightable. I personally disagree with that assessment. Among all the other possible factors for considering that packaging *is* copyrightable, I think the effort argument is the
easiest to understand.

Depending on your jurisdiction, ®Effort¯, is not, as I understand it, relevant to whether something is copyrightable or not. It's not
relevant in the US (per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow#United_States), in the
EU you get concept like database rights (which I don't think are
particularly relevant to Debian packaging).

It is more nuanced than that, because there is a distinction between ?creative work? and ?non-creative work?. Quoting the Wikipidia page you linked to about the idea that ?non-creative work? could be copyrightable (known as the ?sweat of the brow? doctrine):
"Sweat of the brow is a copyright law doctrine. According to this doctrine, an author gains rights through simple diligence during the creation of a work, such as a database, or a directory. Substantial creativity or "originality" is not required."
And, further down:
"The United States rejected this doctrine in the 1991 United States Supreme Court case Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service;[4] until then it had been upheld in a number of US copyright cases.[5][6]"
"Under the Feist ruling in the US, mere collections of facts are considered unoriginal and thus not protected by copyright, no matter how much work went into collating them. The arrangement and presentation of a collection may be original, but not if it is "simple and obvious" such as a list in alphabetical or chronological order.?
Therefore, *non-creative work* is not a measure of copyrightability, like compiling a list of every phone number in a city and putting them in a phone book, but, *creating work* is. I think it is fairly easy to argue that Debian packaging involves a large amount of *creative work*, and is thus copyrightable. One way of measuring that is if two people were to independently do the work, would the output be identical. For a phone book, the answer is probably yes. For Debian packaging, based on my experience with collaborative maintenance, the answer would be never.
(We can?t even agree on what the names of the branches should be in the packaging repository, let alone what the actual *contents* of the debian directory should be. And even when we do agree, there are many different, creative ways to implement what we agree on.)

When I consider the hours and hours and hours it often takes to get
the contents of debian/* into good shape for proper packaging, I think
it is impossible to argue that so little effort is required, or that
Debian packaging is such an obvious task, or that the results are just
a set of default values that don?t represent any actual labor. That
fact that Debian packaging done well requires so much effort, and that
it takes so long for new packagers to become good at it, is a strong indication that it is copyrightable.

Out of interest, do you think that the output of large language models
is copyrightable?

In the US it is not, because US copyright law requires that the copyrighted material be created by a human being. So, the output of a LLM is not copyrightable.
"306 The Human Authorship Requirement
"The U.S. Copyright Office will register an original work of authorship, provided that the work was created by a human being.
"The copyright law only protects ?the fruits of intellectual labor? that ?are founded in the creative powers of the mind.? Trade-Mark Cases, 100 U.S. 82, 94 (1879). Because copyright law is limited to ?original intellectual conceptions of the author,? the Office will refuse to register a claim if it determines that a human being did not create the work. Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony, 111 U.S. 53, 58 (1884). For representative examples of works that do not satisfy this requirement, see Section 313.2 below.? https://copyright.gov/comp3/chap300/ch300-copyrightable-authorship.pdf
--
Soren Stoutner
soren@debian.org


--- PyGate Linux v1.5.11
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Subject: as any other metadata + code expression Question: Is Packaging Copyrightable

When I consider the hours and hours and hours it often takes to get the

contents of debian/* into good shape for proper packaging, I think it i

s

impossible to argue that so little effort is required, or that Debian

packaging is such an obvious task, or that the results are just a set o

f

default values that don?t represent any actual labor. That fac

t that Debian

packaging done well requires so much effort, and that it takes so long

for new

packagers to become good at it, is a strong indication that it is copyrightable.

That. If Debian package were so trivial, that it can't even be
copyrighted, we can go out and party instead.

Packaging, which is a collection of metadata + code is IMHO as
copyrightable as any other metadata + code, which overall "might be copyrightable" depending on how creative it is.

E.g. if it is just some minor templated content: good luck trying to
claim copyright later on it, be it packaging or even the
underlying package content.

From my PoV: the point of us often stating a copyright + license (since
we AINL) is somewhat of adding a stake in the ground that in case the
content would evolve into sufficiently unique and would be
assessed to be copyrightable - here is the copyright and license to go
along. It is not done when known ahead of time that copyright could not
even be assessed (e.g. works of .gov)

Cheers,
--
Yaroslav O. Halchenko
Center for Open Neuroscience http://centerforopenneuroscience.org
Dartmouth College, 419 Moore Hall, Hinman Box 6207, Hanover, NH 03755
WWW: http://www.linkedin.com/in/yarik

--- PyGate Linux v1.5.11
* Origin: Dragon's Lair, PyGate NNTP<>Fido Gate (3:633/10)