If you keep changing the year to the current year, you’re essentially lying about when it was created and artificially extending the duration of your copyright by one year per year.
If you put the wrong year, it renders the copyright notice invalid in the USA. This isn’t a big deal (creative works are copyrighted by default), but if you’re putting the notice there at all, presumably you care about it actually being legally valid.
Most people should just remove it. It doesn’t matter.
Are you? Isn't the expiration based on when the author dies, so the publication date doesn't matter?
What you may not do is just assume that the code you found is free to use when no license is included.
I should put patents on legalese phrases. Weird way of protecting myself against innocent people is an undervalued art. Wait, Oracle would still win at this.
A copyright message on the site itself relates purely to the generic site filler and not the individual articles etc.
I mean semantically, I always figured copyright is the minute it's published the first time... kind of like 'established in 1979'.
However, if you are of the mindset that this should be done...then you should probably have it done automatically somehow...even on a static site generator it could probably be re-generated on a cron or something and automatically set that footer...even easier if using dynamic sites.
You do. You don’t need the notice to hold the copyright. You get it automatically as soon as it’s created. The notice is unnecessary.
But if you lie about the creation date by keep changing it to the current year, and somebody can prove their copy existed before the current year, it might make enforcing your copyright difficult.
You should just keep it simple and use the correct year.
source: https://matija.suklje.name/how-and-why-to-properly-write-cop... who is a lawyer
