If generated that way, I wonder if they can be copyrighted. My problem in doing this is I don't have the software, I just have a list of third party software that's in it, and I am trying to make the correct copyright disclosures for that software.

The GPL has specific language that covers "derivative works", which would apply in these circumstances.

I am extremely familiar with the licenses; I am just having trouble finding the actual text of the copyright -- as in, "The Remote Tea Java Package has been written by Harald Albrecht (harald@plt.rwth-aachen.de). Copyright © 1999, 2003 Chair of Process Control Engineering,Aachen University of Technology,52064 Aachen, Germany." That language.

But do you need to disclose the copyrights of software that you are using with via the GPL? If so, it would seem to make it prohibitively hard to release anything that used GPL'd software.

I would be curious to know what is prohibitive. My understanding is that -- leaving the viral problem aside-- you just need to keep all notices intact and have a copy of the license and a disclosure of who owns the copyright and what years where the user will find it (the readme, or the help section under legal disclosures, for example). Also make the source code available. (I want to type more but this keyboard is giving me trouble!)

Well, imagine you want to ship a product with Ubuntu Linux installed. How are you ever going to find who owns the copyright every piece of source code included in building the distribution?

Here's a question for the hivemind - is there any podcast creation software out there that will let me customize the XML it generates? Or an XML editor that will do this for me?

Basically, I need to generate NITF documents to assign metadata to a large number of video files, and I don't want to have to type each one out individually because it will take an assload of time. (We're talking 500+ videos.) And so far all the podcasting software I've looked at generates XML with itunes-specific tags.

Well, imagine you want to ship a product with Ubuntu Linux installed. How are you ever going to find who owns the copyright every piece of source code included in building the distribution?

I meant to answer this last night. I don't know anything about Ubuntu Linux, but if it's released under GPL, the program itself should have the disclosure one is looking for. Just cut and paste.

Ubuntu is a very popular Linux distribution. It contains tens of thousands of individual programs compiled from hundreds of thousands of source files. Maybe if you download it you can find the copyright information you're looking for. I didn't see any listing of copyright holders in a cursory examination, but if such disclosures must be there, you might find what you need.

That's a pretty clever idea. Although I am assuming I don't have the permissions to download something that big to my work computer. For the bison parsers, which were the two copyrights I couldn't find, I punted and told the developers to find the copyright themselves.

FWIW, apparently "You can find the copyrights and licenses for every package installed on your system by looking in the file /usr/share/doc/package-name/copyright once you've installed a package on your system." Not that I installed any packages, but that's seemingly how Ubuntu discloses.