-The versions that matter, for purposes of this list, are versions that
-were ancestors of the current version. So if you made a temporary
-branch in maintenance, and worked on branches A and B in parallel, then
-each branch would have its own list of years, which is based on the
-versions released in that branch. A version in branch A need not be
-reflected in the list of years for branch B, and vice versa.
-
-However, if you copy code from branch A into branch B, the years for
-branch A (or at least, for the parts that you copied into branch B) do
-need to appear in the list in branch B, because now they are ancestors
-of branch B.
-
-This rule is complicated. If we were in charge of copyright law, we
-would probably change this (as well as many other aspects).
+The copyright statement may be split across multiple lines, both in
+source files and in any generated output. This often happens for
+files with a long history, having many different years of
+publication.