(debian-policy.info)Copyright information

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12.5 Copyright information
==========================

Every package must be accompanied by a verbatim copy of its copyright
information and distribution license in the file
‘/usr/share/doc/package/copyright’.  This file must neither be
compressed nor be a symbolic link.

In addition, the copyright file must say where the upstream sources (if
any) were obtained, and should include a name or contact address for the
upstream authors.  This can be the name of an individual or an
organization, an email address, a web forum or bugtracker, or any other
means to unambiguously identify who to contact to participate in the
development of the upstream source code.

Packages in the `contrib' or `non-free' archive areas should state in
the copyright file that the package is not part of the Debian
distribution and briefly explain why.

A copy of the file which will be installed in
‘/usr/share/doc/package/copyright’ should be in ‘debian/copyright’ in
the source package.

‘/usr/share/doc/package’ may be a symbolic link to another directory in
‘/usr/share/doc’ only if the two packages both come from the same source
and the first package Depends on the second.  These rules are important
because ‘copyright’ files must be extractable by mechanical means.

Packages distributed under the Apache license (version 2.0), the
Artistic license, the Creative Commons CC0-1.0 license, the GNU GPL
(versions 1, 2, or 3), the GNU LGPL (versions 2, 2.1, or 3), the GNU FDL
(versions 1.2 or 1.3), and the Mozilla Public License (version 1.1 or
2.0) should refer to the corresponding files under
‘/usr/share/common-licenses’, (1) rather than quoting them in the
copyright file.

You should not use the copyright file as a general ‘README’ file.  If
your package has such a file it should be installed in
‘/usr/share/doc/package/README’ or ‘README.Debian’ or some other
appropriate place.

All copyright files must be encoded in UTF-8.

Machine-readable copyright information

   ---------- Footnotes ----------

   (1) In particular, ‘/usr/share/common-licenses/Apache-2.0’,
‘/usr/share/common-licenses/Artistic’,
‘/usr/share/common-licenses/CC0-1.0’,
‘/usr/share/common-licenses/GPL-1’, ‘/usr/share/common-licenses/GPL-2’,
‘/usr/share/common-licenses/GPL-3’, ‘/usr/share/common-licenses/LGPL-2’,
‘/usr/share/common-licenses/LGPL-2.1’,
‘/usr/share/common-licenses/LGPL-3’,
‘/usr/share/common-licenses/GFDL-1.2’,
‘/usr/share/common-licenses/GFDL-1.3’,
‘/usr/share/common-licenses/MPL-1.1’, and
‘/usr/share/common-licenses/MPL-2.0’ respectively.  The University of
California BSD license is also included in base-files as
‘/usr/share/common-licenses/BSD’, but given the brevity of this license,
its specificity to code whose copyright is held by the Regents of the
University of California, and the frequency of minor wording changes,
its text should be included in the copyright file rather than
referencing this file.