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The MIT license requires specification of the copyright holder:

Copyright (c) [year] [fullname]

Is it preferable to use diacritics, such as:

Copyright (c) 2026 Jiří Lastname

Or instead omit it:

Copyright (c) 2026 Jiri Lastname

The approach with diacritics feels better from a legal standpoint. But, the approach of omitting diacritics feels better from the standpoint of uniformity with the character set of the license and source code, which often contains only ASCII characters. However, neither of the arguments seems particularly strong. Is one of the approaches recommended over another?

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  • What's the (c) in there for? You can write "Copyright" or "©", but there's no need for both. Commented 18 hours ago
  • @TobySpeight while there's no one canonical copy of the MIT license, multiple well known uses do have "Copyright (c)" e.g. dotnet as does the copy of Wikipedia. Commented 16 hours ago

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As of 2026, just use the diacritics. The number of systems which can't handle UTF-8 these days is becoming vanishingly small.

(Obvious exception is if you're doing something where you know the common tools will choke on non-ASCII characters)

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    Even in such cases, is there any reason not to use something like Copyright (c) 2026 Jiří Lastname (Jiri Lastname)? Just to be on the safe side? Commented Apr 13 at 14:27
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    @terdon I'd say it's redundant. A human can work that out, and if a computer is going to barf on "ř" then it's still going to barf. Commented Apr 13 at 14:29
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    @terdon Thinking about this a bit more, your idea has value if the anglicisation of your name isn't obvious. While Jiří is apparently mostly happy to be referred to as Jiri, I personally wouldn't know what to do with "Copyright (c) 2026 习近平" so adding "(Xi Jinping)" is probably useful there. Commented Apr 13 at 17:37
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    Yeah, that's the kind of thing I was thinking of. I'm half Greek, for instance, and the link between the Greek and English versions of my name is far from obvious. Commented Apr 13 at 17:54
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If Jiří is your name, then Jiří is your name. Unless there are known technical reasons to do so, there is little point in mutilating it yourself.

Even if you are working with one of the vanishingly few examples which will not tolerate UTF-8 data in comments in source code files, there's little reason not to have the LICENSE file saved in UTF-8, since it is an ubiquitously known and recognised encoding at this point.

One valid exception I can think of is if you're also developing with legacy tools in legacy environments on legacy systems.

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From a legal perspective, most legal systems don't care. As long as something is recognizably intended to represent your name, it's good enough to form a legally binding licence grant. This is true at least in the US and the UK, and I believe in most other jurisdictions. So the question is: do you care about the use of the diacritics enough to want to include them, or would you rather keep the file in plain ASCII?

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  • I think this is a good point. The copyright notice is just a notice, not an incantation. It's so someone can't reasonably claim they didn't know the work was copyrighted. Commented Apr 12 at 22:37
  • @ChrisBouchard: While true, this particular copyright notice must be considered as part of the MIT license grant. Commented Apr 13 at 7:29
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    @MSalters - its purpose in the license grant is simply to identify which person has granted the license. As long as it reasonably identifies the correct person, nobody's going to have any issue with it. Commented Apr 13 at 9:11
  • But for example a German court can tell you that a German name with diacritics removed does not ireasonably dentify the correct person. Commented Apr 15 at 21:00
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    @gnasher729 German has standard replacements for umlauts (ä to ae) and esszett (ß to ss) specifically for contexts in which they cannot be represented as literals. Commented Apr 16 at 1:10
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On a web page - use your real name. You can always change it if things go south (the inscription, not the name :))

In immutable places where you do not control the whole process, don't take risks. In one of my publications (in a super journal), my name, say Mölme, got parsed as Merrorolme. Irreversibly.

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The name of the copyright holder should be the name of the copyright holder. And in many countries (France, Germany, Czech Republic etc. ) diacritics in names are very, very common. In some cases removing diacritics doesn't create a "name with diacritics removed" but a really different name. So keep the diacritics.

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  • For German names, there's a standard way to replace diacritics like Jörg becomes Joerg. Commented Apr 16 at 6:45

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