2.7 Document Permissions

This segment describes the document and contains the copyright notice and copying permissions. This is done with the @copying command. A real manual includes more text here, according to the license under which it is distributed.

@copying
This is a short example of a complete Texinfo file, version 1.0.

Copyright @copyright{} 2016 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
@end copying

The copyright notice and copying permissions for a document need to appear in several places in the various Texinfo output formats. Therefore, Texinfo provides a command (@copying) to declare this text once, and another command (@insertcopying) to insert the text at appropriate points.

If the document is a software manual, the software is typically under a different license—for GNU and many other free software packages, software is usually released under the GNU GPL, and manuals are released under the GNU FDL. It is helpful to state the license of the software of the manual, but giving the complete text of the software license is not necessarily required.