Tell HN: Update copyright year in your website

21 points by user7878 4 years ago | 25 comments

Just a reminder to update copyright year in your website if it is static

JimDabell 4 years ago |

Don’t. The copyright year is not the current year. The copyright year is the year it was created / first published.

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.

spiffytech 4 years ago | |

If you're putting the copyright date on a website, shouldn't it be the year of the most recent content/code change? I'd expect it to be similar to publishing a second edition of a book, which would get a new copyright date from the first edition. Older revisions of the website (e.g., in the Wayback Machine) would be subject to older dates, but the date on the page should be date of the version of the site the user is accessing, not the date of the first version of the website.

nelgaard 4 years ago | |

LinAGKar 4 years ago | |

>artificially extending the duration of your copyright by one year per year.

Are you? Isn't the expiration based on when the author dies, so the publication date doesn't matter?

laurent92 4 years ago | |

What about source files? Are they required to have OSS headers with copyright + licenses?

Thiez 4 years ago | | |

No. When you just find some source code without a license (either as header or included as a separate fire) you must assume there is no license, so "all rights reserved" applies. So no header is required to protect the code.

What you may not do is just assume that the code you found is free to use when no license is included.

DitheringIdiot 4 years ago |

You don’t need to have any copyright symbols on anything for it to be protected:

https://www.gov.uk/copyright

Thiez 4 years ago |

If you didn't update the content of the page itself, surely updating the copyright year on every page is just a big fat lie?

aetherspawn 4 years ago | |

I guess that updating the copyright itself is a change.

andreareina 4 years ago | | |

A copyright notice doesn't get copyright protection, so no.

laurent92 4 years ago | |

Are legal documents copyrighted? If so, the copyright mention is part of the legalese.

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.

chrismorgan 4 years ago |

Counterproposal: ditch at least the year. It’s obviously silly.

JimDabell 4 years ago | |

It needs the year to be legally valid. But removing it altogether is perfectly reasonable. Creative works are copyrighted by default, no notice necessary.

chrismorgan 4 years ago | | |

If the year is nonsense, it won’t be legally valid. A statement identifying the copyright holder should surely carry just as much weight legally, and is certainly more useful. Certainly removing it outright is the sensible thing in most places, I was just suggesting a better middle ground for those that want to have something there.

kcartlidge 4 years ago |

The copyright should be applied (if at all) to individual pieces of content, and remain unchanged until/unless a new version is issued.

A copyright message on the site itself relates purely to the generic site filler and not the individual articles etc.

gremlinsinc 4 years ago |

So, if I update the copyright...and some copycat sets their copyright say at 2019....who retains the copyright?

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.

JimDabell 4 years ago | |

> So, if I update the copyright...and some copycat sets their copyright say at 2019....who retains the copyright?

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.

topicseed 4 years ago |

What is the true legal value of that date, or date range?

andreareina 4 years ago | |

It's simply a notice for when the material was (first) published, to establish what is the duration of the copyright. (c) 1999-2022 means "some stuff was published in 1999, some in 2022, and some in the intervening years". The individual entries will have copyright according to the date they were individually published---a new post doesn't extend the copyright of existing ones.

ekianjo 4 years ago | |

not anymore as far as I remember

FireInsight 4 years ago |

Just a reminder to license your website under a CC license.

g5095 4 years ago |

People don't use JS for this?

FireInsight 4 years ago | |

People use JS for this?

trintonsinc 4 years ago |

do these footers actually carry any weight? regardless, thanks for the reminder--updated!

that_guy_iain 4 years ago | |

I'm not a lawyer but my 10-second google search came back with the bumping of the year only starts the copyright time length thingy (very technical term) if there has been substantial changes. Otherwise, it's pointless.

source: https://matija.suklje.name/how-and-why-to-properly-write-cop... who is a lawyer