[PATCH 0 of 3 DRAFT STABLE] Remove copyright years and switch to Contributors

[timeless]

This series should be in five parts:
1. Remove the year bits (and possibly change to Contributors)
2. Remove all rights reserved (not present)
3. Fix the win32 build (not present) to package a better Contributors.txt
4. Candidate localization fixes (included, but severable)
5. Finalization of Candiate localization fixes (included, almost certainly to
be vetod, since in theory it means that localizers won't notice the change)

Only part 1 is necessary, it alone will cause the localizations to get
English copyright statements until they update. Part 2 is really unrelated
to copyright years, but since the Mozilla changes bundled it, and the
description which I'm quoting (with slight changes to match Mercurial) covered
it, I'm including a placeholder for it. -- And if hg email eats this message,
I'll include that changeset (after writing it). Part 3 covers what is a
somewhat related item (referenced near the end of this cover letter). Part 4
was written because it was fun. Please note that some locales have ""
translations for copyright, I can't remember what that does. Part 5 is split
out because I know that if I fold it in, mg will complain. My general
experience with this stuff, and part of the reason I'm doing it is that
localizers don't understand it, at which point one might as well wade into
their waters (which is what everyone does when they do mindless year bumps).

This is based on Phil Ringnalda's research for Mozilla in
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=536336#c0

Mercurial, like Mozilla, 
has multiple localized and non-localized copyright statements of the form
"© 2005-2010 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, as well as
several which aren't visible anywhere at all.

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 ... and then people object to
them not being changed in their locale on branches.
--
I haven't checked Mercurial's policy on changing locales for branches.
--
Failing to update them makes us look sloppy and inattentive.

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
instead insist that changes 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 2005
and then leave them alone

Harvey in context is Harvey Anderson, General Counsel for Mozilla Corporation.

This next blob applies to contrib/hgk (which is not patched in this series, but
i'll probably toss it in later).

Harvey: I slipped one more bit of internet lawyering in, because ...
contrib/hgk has a
Buenos Aires Convention "all rights reserved"
currently reading "Copyright (C) 2005 Paul Mackerras.  All rights reserved."
Since Buenos Aires is dead, 
it's not true, has no legal meaning anymore, and is not at all the tone we're
trying for, it should be removed, but I can remove it separately.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=536336#c1
-- Harvey Andrerson writes:
Thanks for trying to clean this up. Removing "All Rights Reserved" is good.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=536336#c2
-- Harvey Andrerson continues:
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.

Note that there's a significant difference between what Mozilla had and what
Mercurial had. In theory Mercurial's copyright to Mark and others might hold
more water since Mark is a recognizable name. I'm not sure on this point.

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

I think "others" probably falls into the same unhappy bucket as covered by
Mozilla's problem case.

What I liked while patching was the contrib/win32/ReadMe.html file,
which (after patching) has:

      Mercurial is Copyright Contributors
      the <tt>Contributors.txt</tt> file for a list of contributors.

Contributors here is recognizable. Unfortunately, it comes from CONTRIBUTORS,
and that's obsolete... Oh well. I think it's still useful, since Contributors
maps just as easily to CONTRIBUTORS which then has instructions for using
hg log (well, abstract NEEDS WORK instructions, but hey...).