I agree. Can't we identify a set of "tags" that do not imply creativity so to be able to paint a line?

IMHO (IANAL) the simplest pom having only a groupId/artifactId/version (so the one automatically generated by maven is not a creative work: does anyone disagree on this?

The name, url, issueManagement, inceptionYear, organization and license tags are "facts" about the described artifact, IMHO there is nothing creative there, do you agree?

Like the "description" also the "dependency" tag is sometimes (*some times*) simple to guess, but this involve a creative process to choose the right versions. (Choosing the scope is not a creative work, IMHO).

About pratical examples (some artifact I use):

dnsjava pom, IMHO, is *not* the result of a creative work: http://repo1.maven.org/maven2/dnsjava/dnsjava/2.0.1/dnsjava-2.0.1.pom

javamail can be found in 2 repositories: https://maven-repository.dev.java.net/nonav/repository/javax.mail/poms/mail-1.4.pom http://repo1.maven.org/maven2/javax/mail/mail/1.4/mail-1.4.pom both of them includes the javax.activation dependency, so it is questionable. What do you think?

what about junit.pom? Is that descriptor the result of something creative? http://repo1.maven.org/maven2/junit/junit/3.8.1/junit-3.8.1.pom

My main issue is that junit is used by almost any project around, this pom does not include a license header and we cannot guess it is redistributed under the same license of the junit itself (because it is not part of the junit redistributable). So someone wrote it or copied it somewhere and uploaded to central. For what we know it could be something written by someone else and having all right reserved to the original author (that we don't know). For what we know we don't even have the right to automatically let maven download it to build a single project, right? "Central" is used by default by maven. Maven should warn the user that simply running "mvn" against any project could make him violate the copyright for some file automatically downloaded without his consensus?