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As a thought experiment: if a date is not actually in the document, but is updated dynamically by the document, what legal purpose could it serve? It seems an exhibit with no more legal relevance than a pocket watch.
I have literally never seen an innocent infringement defense succeed due to a missing copyright notice in a situation around websites (and in fact, in a lot of countries, it's not even possible anymore)
http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ03.pdf
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_notice
http://www.copyrightservice.co.uk/copyright/p03_copyright_no...
I use them out of courtesy, to notice the person in front of the content that said content is (c) and that I actually did not forget to set a BSD/MIT/GPL/CC license, and/or to link to the actual license (which indeed leverages copyright).
Of course I know this is not needed from a legal PoV but I'm not using it for legal protection, I'm using it for actual humans to parse.
Also, the date metadata has been useful to me a few times. Please don't increment it automatically.
But thanks for the links. There also seem to be (other?) lawyers on this comment thread who have pointed out how useless such notices are for enforceable copyright protection.
Well not unless you are worried about your copyright in 100 years.
You could have copyright 2001, that doesn't mean it expires 2002, or 2003 or even 2015.
Given that Disney characters and stories would come into public domain soon, you can also easily bet copyright will be extended for hundreds of years by Congress.
In 1976 Congress extended copyright to 50 years beyond the authors life. This means if you made your site in 2000 and you died today, the copyright would still be good until 2050. And you don't even need a notice for copyright in the USA, it is copyright unless stated otherwise by default.
Based on the logic of the previous sentence, wouldn't it be good until 2064?
Corporations get 75 and will most certainly keep getting extensions, can you imagine Disney ever becoming public domain?
If I find an awesome poem published on a website and I'd like to use it, I have to find the copyright holder. The notice tells me; when (roughly) the poem was written, and who it was written by. I can then find the correct people and hopefully obtain a license.
In 50+ years the notice might tell me that the work is likely to be in the public domain. It won't tell me for sure, but it would be an indicator.
A date range tells me that the poem has been altered over the years. It was first written in X and last altered in Y. You certainly don't want a copyright notice that simply updates to the current year. You're then misleading any person who might be trying to find you. As has been mentioned before, putting an incorrect date would not change your actual copyrights.
I'm currently part of a project (in the UK) looking to simplify the rights processes (focussing on video atm). I've been to several meetings with copyright lawyers and attended some copyright workshops. IANAL though, I just know some.
You have no notice on your work
A person thinks they bought rights to your work from someone who is not you, AND has been reasonably misled by the lack of notice into believing they have rights to your work.
They did not actually get rights, they just think they did, because of the missing notice that would have informed them that you owned the rights.
You sue them.
In this case, you can stop them in the future, but you may get no past damages. Anything they do after the point that they receive notice, they owe damages for.
As I mentioned, i'm aware of zero cases this has occurred around internet websites. I'd love to hear of one.
(claims of innocent infringement defense are common. It's almost always asserted. I'm saying i'm not aware of a valid or successful claim around a website due to a missing copyright notice).
TL;DR: Nobody knows. You're screwed.
At best, though, it shows that you made an effort to remind your visitors of your copyright. While not strictly required by law, it might help convey a sense of good faith and conscientiousness to the judge or jury.
Readers will thank you that they aren't forced to scan the whole page to see whether what they're reading is recent or not.
I'm not a lawyer, but I've been in meetings where management decided the year needs to update, so that's when I started using this snippet:
in ruby html.erb: <%= Time.now.year %>
© 2014 NodeSocket, LLC.
© 2012-2014 NodeSocket, LLC. © 2014 GitHub, Inc.
© 2014 DigitalOcean ™ Inc.
© 2014, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Facebook © 2014
Copyright © 2014 Tesla Motors, Inc. All rights reserved.
I assume Google knows better and starting this year we are doing the same with our web site.
There are a little over a dozen influential Superman cartoons[1] from the 1940s that are public domain. That's the kind of thing that would be public domain -- it couldn't be a Mickey merchandising free-for-all or anything.
That being said, they certainly won't give up copyright protection unless they are forced.
First, the form is often wrong, which makes it the same as no notice.
Second, if the date is wrong, it depends.
If you use too early a date, you lose that many years of protection.
If you use a date 1 year or more after first publication, it's the same as no notice
So what you get by using wrong notices can be worse than nothing. You actually lose some protection.
As for the rest of the reason not to do it, because it's complete an total cargo cult lawyering that wastes tons of time? You think you are getting something. You are getting worse than nothing. You are wasting time (this thread etc) figuring out how and when to update something, and whether it's legally correct, etc.
The best protection is that which helps to keep at least some unauthorized copying from happening in the first place, not that which lets the copyright owner (expensively) go to court.
Elsewhere in this thread, @lloeki is on the right track: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8809137
I actually would seriously doubt that it does.
Either way, including a copyright notice is an extremely-cheap hedge, with little or no appreciable downside risk; if it deters even one copier, it has justified its close-to-epsilon cost.
Except, as I pointed out, it has serious downside risk. If you do it wrong, you are heavily penalized by law. If you do it right, you get some vague and possibly zero benefit.
For U.S. works created after the Berne Convention went into effect in 1989, that won't be the case. Consider the possibilities under 17 U.S.C. 406(b):
1. If you use too-early a date in the copyright notice, you lose that many years of protection. If it's just a year or two, or even 10 years, that's almost literally rounding error compared to the term of copyright.
2. If you use a year that's one year too late (e.g., 2016 for a 2015-published work), you're fine.
3. If you use a date that's more than one year too late (e.g., 2018 for a 2015-published work), it's the same as publishing with no notice. But because it's a post-Berne work, you don't need a copyright notice. So you don't care.
So for post-Berne works, there seems to be almost literally zero downside to including a copyright notice of some kind. Even just the word "Copyright XYZ Inc." with no date would give you some deterrent effect, even if it turned out to have no legal significance. Am I missing something here?