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, 9 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.

12.5.1. Machine-readable copyright information

A specification for a standard, machine-readable format for debian/copyright files is maintained as part of the debian-policy package. This document may be found in the copyright-format files in the debian-policy package. It is also available from the Debian web mirrors at https://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/.

Use of this format is optional.