dc3dd copyright

[Tim]

I'm not sure the exact context of the discussion or how things are
normally handled in Debian, but do keep in mind that licenses do not
equate to copyrights.  Just because someone happens to license a patch
against my project under the same license that I'm using doesn't mean
that I own their code.  They still own that code and happened to
license it to me to include it in the project.  Ideally, all
contributions should be attributed to the respective copyright
holders.  In practice it's rediculously difficult to break out line by
line who added what, so most of the time people do it file-by-file, at
least noting who touched it.

At the end of the day, if a project needs to defend it's copyrights
against someone who is abusing the code, having a long list of names
makes any legal challenges against the code base more difficult for an
adversary.  

Of course, Debian maintainers shouldn't have to go to great lengths to
keep track of this stuff.  The upstream people should be encouraged to
make proper attributions clear in their projects...

tim