MIT-license: "The copyright statement has to be in every copy" ?

Question

Hi,

On the official webpage of MIT-license is written following:

Copyright (c) <year> <copyright holders>

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

So my question is: where do I have to "include" that copyright notice?

In my code? No, I don't think so....
On my website where I sell the software? Maybe.
In a readme file included in my software package?

Thanks

Answer 1

Usual thing to do is to create LICENSE file in the top directory of your package with source files.

Answer 2

It's best to put this statement at the beginning of the source file that is dealing with this component. Also, it's a good practice to attach this notice or mention that this software contains a (modification/source) of this-and-that package under this license in the documentation (call it README, manual etc.)

Answer 3

Are you looking to write an MIT-licensed program, or incorporate MIT-licensed code in another program?

If the former, putting it in the source code and in a LICENSE text file to distribute with binaries is a good idea.

If the latter, then you need to incorporate that copyright notice into any source file into which you copy the MIT-licensed sources. You also probably need to include a LICENSE file of some kind indicating "Portions copyright YYYY <Original Author>", in such a way that it makes it clear that the MIT licensing provisions do not extend to the rest of your program (unless you want them to). In this case, if you are not distributing the source code, you technically probably don't need to include the copyright notice in the source code files, but I would recommend it anyway to remind yourself (or someone else looking at the code later) where the externally-sourced code is and what obligations are connected to it.