Does anyone know who or what the legal entity "The Go Authors" is/are?
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It's a shorthand referring to all authors in the same way as "The Android Open Source Project". Their open source projects don't use copyright assignment so there are many copyright owners.
cla.developers.google.com/about/google-i is what they have individuals sign to contribute to any projects.
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I assume that, but has this actually been validated via a lawyer or the courts? Because if I copy the file + LICENSE, it's not clear who the copyright owner is.
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There's no requirement to provide a list of the copyright owners. The licenses require you preserve the copyright notices and the authors have chosen to refer to themselves as "The Go Authors" or "The Android Open Source Project" so you just have to preserve the notice as is.
It's just a shorthand to refer to the overall group of authors since Google only owns a large portion of the code rather than all of it. It'd be very impractical to list out each owner especially as it moves across files and this makes it much easier to comply with the license.
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The header at the top of the files is also just a reference to the actual copyright notice / license. It's strictly required to have the actual notice intact. The file headers are only there to make it easier to follow the licensing. It's the LICENSE file that actually matters.
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The copyright statement is different than the license and different laws apply.
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In this case the individual files refer to an actual notice elsewhere instead of having a bunch of them for each file. They distribute each notice variation with software like Android. If a project has 10 files different variations of the notice, they actually ship 10 of them.
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