"Some rights reserved" is a still a sometimes useful, though cheeky, signal for copyleft, Creative Commons, or open source, though. (From what I recall, it started a branding/marketing choice from Creative Commons, but in the wild I've seen it in more places than just CC licensed works.) It's not legally binding in any way, just a fun signal to humans that they might have more rights to play with than full copyright.
> I’ve stopped participating after I learned that copyright statements need only the year of the first publication and no lawyer that I asked contradicted.
This is true for a work that is published (or just created) and then doesn’t change after that, but there are multiple reasons why one might update the year on code:
If the code changes, it’s a new work and the new version’s term of copyright starts in the current year, not the year the file was created.
Even if the code doesn’t change, companies may still wish to try to extend their copyrights, claiming a new term every year, which pushes the expiration date out one more year every year. For code that doesn’t change, updating the year obviously might have no basis in law, but companies are free to interpret their copyright as applying to the entire repo rather than a single file, and companies aren’t necessarily being malicious with copyright terms, many clearly believe updating the year is a legal requirement, because it used to be.
Leaving the year out of the copyright notice might have the same effective goal, to make the term of copyright appear current at a glance, no matter when it is read.
Maybe this will all matter in the year 2173 when the first code copyrights start to expire. /s :P
Good question! The term length for work for hire (as well as anonymous & pseudonymous work) starts at time of creation, at least under both the Berne convention and US copyright law. Individual works (i.e., something you made for yourself and not for a company) do expire some time after the author’s death.
I brought this up at a startup I worked at when the CTO insisted we change the year in every source file.
I gave multiple examples of other code bases at Microsoft and Google and other big companies that dont include the year at all in some cases and definitely dont update every year.
He said our lawyers said it had to be updated but I was always suspicious he didnt actually ask.
Explain to the lawyer that these things are hand managed and that dates will slip in which have been copied from other headers in other files, making the years in the headers unreliable, and that if it ever came up in court that you'd have to testify to their unreliability -- while also explaining that git was considerably more reliable and that any one individual commit which had incorrect dates could generally be identified by surrounding dates.
That will generally tickle their aversion to putting data that could fail under cross examination in front of a court and they'll be more likely to let you delete all the dates entirely.
There's literally no reason for them anyway. You don't even need a copyright statement, but you probably do have a copyright file with years in it, and you've got git for supplimentary info on exactly when any given line of code went into the codebase.
Also if you're updating every file every year you're losing the information on when a piece of code when into the codebase, which is the only important thing anyway in the case of patent lawsuits, expiration of copyright really isn't an issue worth worrying about (and I think bumping the copyrights every year is wrong policy there as well).
While you're at it, remove all the Author lines as well with the people who no longer have anything to do with the project and their old e-mails which don't work.
It's one of those things that you don't need to do, but it doesn't hurt to do. So managers (and lawyers) will recommend you do it anyway, possibly as a CYA measure.
I think legally meaningless CYA statements are actually dangerous.
They can suck the air out of actual understanding of the legal situation at hand and, in the worst case, lead to an warped understanding of copyright that interacts with the world with supposed magical incantations that are legally totally meaningless or even the opposite of the truth. (I’m thinking of those YouTube videos e.g. showing some snippet of a film uploaded by someone who doesn’t have the copyright with the totally bonkers “copyright Universal 2020, no infringement intended” note. I know, that‘s mostly about someone who is not a business and who usually doesn’t have anything to do with copyright being confused about the difference between attribution and copyright and thinking giving attribution gives you copyright – which is bonkers. Fair use does require attribution, but simply copying something verbatim is certainly not fair use.)
Another thing to be cognizant of is the Gell–Mann amnesia effect and adjacent phenomena.
Especially when people talk about professions like lawyers, etc. it's almost as if they conceive of it as one unified workforce of hypercompetent experts who all know The Truth and can either tell you what it is or, failing that, then at least tell you what you should do in accordance with what The Truth is. But no industry works like that.
Think of how many programmers you know or know of and the range of competencies involved, including absurd practices and just outright weird opinions/positions held by a surprisingly large proportion of folks. Half these people are B- players at best and who are only there because they figured out how to make a living following rituals—which they may not necessarily understand (and some of which may actually be counterproductive but are inoffensive in the sense that they aren't so counterproductive that it will result in being let go).
Or forget that for a moment and just think of how many cases have been tried in court with lawyers on both sides. Do the courts regularly arrive at decisions that recognize counsel for both sides as being right (and it's just, say, the facts that are responsible for their clients losing the cases)? Or can you regularly find lawyers putting forth legal theories that simply don't hold up under scrutiny?
Except it does. It requires an engineer to maintain the dates, and the company to audit that the dates are correct. It directly interferes with source control ("updated copyright" was the bane of my existence when trying to git-bisect a few years ago).
Surely it’s straightforward to use templating and always pull the year from a date library. No changes to source control needed.
Edit: as the article mentions open source documentation it’s possible the repo itself is what needs the year, and there’s no way around hardcoding it in the included licence.
I'll probably continue to include copyright notices and years regardless of legal necessity, but I've never lost sleep over it or put a lot of effort into it. It just seems like a "does no harm, and may clarify things" sort of deal.
This is pretty much the advice of my attorney. "It's not legally required, but I can imagine situations where it could be useful anyway. If it doesn't cost you anything, why not include it?"
Yes, though "CYA" isn't necessarily entirely fair either. The legal system isn't exactly entirely deterministic, particularly if there is a jury involved, so I think the tendency towards conservatism and seeking every edge isn't entirely unreasonable. Cost does certainly have to be weighed against any measures, and particularly for technical issues costs may often not be obvious to lawyers themselves or managers. But after actually experiencing all the stress and costs of a legal case just a few times, and only as a peripheral player, I can understand worries around all of it.
Also to the root's line here:
>I gave multiple examples of other code bases at Microsoft and Google and other big companies that dont include the year at all in some cases and definitely dont update every year.
This is one of those things where it seems reasonable at first blush but then completely not on second look. There are lots of cases in tech where "look these huge players do this" makes sense, but when it comes to either scaling or law things are different. Here I'd be looking for examples of small players doing that, because the big players have such powerful law teams and deep pockets that risks they'd dismiss as unimportant might be existence-threatening to a small company.
Since you said "all of legal history", yes, there are loads of cases. Prior to 1976, in the US, maintaining copyright required doing several steps such that if you failed to do any one of those steps, you lost copyright for good. Failing to renew copyright registration is one of those, and one classic film (It's a Wonderful Life) is public domain because its owner did precisely that.
Post-1976, screwing up copyright formalities means relatively little in copyright (the biggest thing is you lose the ability to sue for statutory damages if you don't register copyright). Eventually, there's going to be legal confusion over what year protections run out, but that isn't going to be relevant for software until quite late this century thanks to the current 95-year copyright regimes.
But that is not the same thing as updating the copyright year on a copyright notice, and you know it.
A film like "It's a Wonderful Life" is a finished work that never changes, unlike software or web sites. In every film, the copyright notice in the credits will remain forever the same. It can't be changed without editing the film ex post facto a la Steven Spielberg or George Lucas. Even if the copyright of "It's a Wonderful Life" had been renewed, the copyright notice in the credits would not have changed.
Which is how it has been for most of the Western world for well over a century. Automatic copyright one of the core principles of the 1886 Berne Convention, but the US only joined in 1989.
It surprises people that the US had, relatively speaking, more copyright hoops for creators to jump through than most of the rest of the world prior to harmonizing with the Berne Convention.
I thought everything is copyrighted by default, but in the US at least if you don't register it limits your legal remedies somewhat (no mandatory minimums and such)?
Here's the summary of how my attorney explained it (IANAL, obviously, and may be misremembering, so consult your own attorney).
In the US, copyright is a thing that applies the moment you have put a work into a fixed, tangible form. Actual publication is not required. If your work is copied, you can sue. But if you register it, you have some additional power and -- perhaps most importantly -- you don't have to worry about a court fight over when the copyright term began. A registered copyright began at the date in the copyright registration. There can be no argument about that.
Some of the other benefits... if you register your copyright, you can sue for statutory damages rather than having to demonstrate actual damages and you gain the ability to recover legal expenses.
You don't need a copyright notice for legal reasons, but it can deter boneheads who mistakenly believe that anything without a copyright notice can be copied freely.
I’m not entirely convinced about this. It constitutes a false statement about the copyright status of the work, which may be illegal in some jurisdictions. There are a few unlikely scenarios in Australia where it might technically become a crime, though by and large Australia ignores anything but authorship in matters of such notices; but mostly it would require that you try to threaten someone unjustly before it would become a crime. In the United States of America, I think it becomes a crime to even claim copyright incorrectly (meaning “this is mine and is in copyright” when it’s public domain, nothing to do with year numbers), without even needing to threaten someone. Mitigating this, both require some degree of knowledge or reasonable expectation thereof.
So, supposing a work-for-hire copyright term of fifty years (yeah, AU and US are both more than that, but I’m simplifying), if a work was actually produced and published in 2000 and you write “copyright 2010–2020” on it, this could actually be technically criminal between 2050 and 2070 in some situations, during which period the work is actually in the public domain but the claim implies it’s not, constituting copyfraud <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyfraud>.
(Fun fact, while thinking of this stuff: Australia has mandatory legal deposit of all publications, since 2016 explicitly including things like websites. I don’t do this for my website, and I’ve never heard of anyone else doing it—in fact it was only a few years ago that I heard about this law at all, when my dad started publishing books; it’d be frightfully inconvenient to do for a website, and it’s all rather ill-specified.)
So, it might theoretically be illegal in some areas in some situations. And I think it should be illegal; it should hurt to go bumping copyright years meaninglessly.
I also just find it funny to think about this practice of bumping copyright years coming back to bite your successors 70 or 95 years down the track, when what seemed harmless silliness at the time suddenly becomes a criminal misrepresentation. ’Course, I don’t think there’s actually much value speculating about specifics of copyright law that far in advance. The last century has shown progress in some areas of copyright (doing it automatically) and massive folly in other areas (obscene and ever-growing durations).
In house counsel’s first priority is to not have a fuck up attributable to them.
Faced with the certainty that a bunch of developers have to do something with zero perceived risk to counsel, or that there is a 0.01% chance that some negative thing would impact them someday maybe, their choice will be to avoid answering the question or status quo.
Lawyers behaving this way should be forced to earn their keep by registering the copyright. Otherwise it's a pointless flex to exploit those powerless to refuse.
For corporate "authorship" (i.e., a work made for hire), the term is not to exceed 95 years from the date of publication and not to exceed 120 years from the date of creation. 17 U.S.C. § 302(c). https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/302
In the tech world, it's hard to imagine that software or content published today will be relevant in a century, but by not updating the year, you are risking the possibility that copyright protection will be cut off sooner (or more likely and more subtly, future infringers will have an innocent infringement defense).
> In the tech world, it's hard to imagine that software or content published today will be relevant in a century, but by not updating the year, you are risking the possibility that copyright protection will be cut off sooner (or more likely and more subtly, future infringers will have an innocent infringement defense).
Small portions of FreeBSD have been untouched since the AT&T sources. That's halfway through. I don't expect anything I write to live that long, though. But I imagine there's some tidbits here and there at Microsoft.
How does slapping a copyright date on every file affect that?
AFAIK the file itself is covered under the copyright of the whole work anyway and doesn't even need a copyright notice.
If the file itself does need a copyright notice, then how does updating the date continue to perpetuate the copyright an additional year into the future with no further updates to the text? AFAIK republication of a book with a new copyright date does not push copyright dates into the future.
Even if you update a few lines in the file, again AFAIK that doesn't update the expiration timer for all the rest of the code.
My understanding is that incrementing the data does nothing for the copyright expiration of the file, and that the act of updating the file with new lines of code is what protects those lines of code into the future, and that no copyright notice is even required.
It isn't like trademark where failure to notify and defend your trademark can eventually lead to your losing your trademark. Since 1989 copyright notices have not been required under law, but the purpose of a copyright notice is simply to reduce the possibility of an "innocent infringement" defense.
> In the tech world, it's hard to imagine that software or content published today will be relevant in a century
It's not that hard to imagine it, really. There is 60 year old software right now that's still relevant and in use, and there is relevant content that is even older.
In the US, if the file has a clear copyright notice then the infringer loses the possible defense of "innocent infringement". So yes there is additional legal protection.
It's a good exercise to try to spot when you're accidentally spreading disinformation. We'd all be better off if we took a second before posting something we think we know, to ask: wait, is this a real thing or is this bullshit?
Here we have the idea that you can do the secret handshake incorrectly and thereby invalidate what most countries view as an automatic right (copyright usually doesn't even require any notice) and that adjudicating judges would shrug and say "Sorry, you used parentheses: my hands are tied. They're free to copy you", based on some random book from the 90s that was likely also full of bullshit. Does that sound right to you?
It's a good exercise to try to spot when you're accidentally spreading disinformation.
You might want to ask yourself that very question.
based on some random book from the 90s that was likely also full of bullshit
Nah, it was an excellent book that I pored over.
I don't understand why you guys are so confident with zero basis for your position other than "I'm so used to seeing it that I assume it's legally valid".
As I explained already, "(c)" is gibberish. Go ask a lawyer if you should put meaningless gibberish in the middle of legal disclaimers.
having an easy way to find the earliest date of a piece of code, might prove useful also in figuring out when an invention was first expressed to the general public. Something that might become useful for patent defense
so while updating the year does not seem very useful, knowing when a file was created is much more useful.
I find that having an up to date year on a copyright line (pref a range from first pub to now) is a "remove the brown m&ms" signal (https://www.thewrap.com/van-halen-brown-mms-remove-concert-r... or a zillion others). If a person or team didn't catch this, what other details did they miss?
So, sure, not required, but helpful to show someone either a) sweats the details or b) knows how to put the year in a generated text line... but at least they took the time to care, once.
(Edited to mention range. Seeing other folks mention hassles of code history just to change year will temper my use of this signal)
Alternatively they "sweat the details" to such an extent that they even understand this aspect of the law and therefore know that it isn't necessary and don't do it. The m&m thing isn't relevant here, the situation is different.
Maybe. But we use "last updated" as a useful signal in many, many places, across code, documents and books, and entertainment. We like recent, new, updated stuff, and we like "authentically old" stuff. As a signal, the date provides value. Having it as "copyright" or simply "last updated" has similar impact in this case.
Sure, no one in the US __needs__ to do this, and there is a cost to it. But the benefit of the signal could outweigh.
Having no date or an old date may send the signal that "the dev team has good legal support", but I wonder how common that perception is. We see from the comments and the parent post that at least the HN crowd has a good chunk of folks who didn't know that date isn't needed.
It's an empirical question to test: does date presence affect evaluation of the object? It would be fun to see. (I would want to try "no date", "last year", "3 years ago", "current year" to see if user perception of the object changes based on presence and time passed).
In general, a post or article should have a posted or updated date. If I just read your undated 2015 article about how to do $X on a Mac, you've probably just wasted my time.
It's probably reasonable to expect a current copyright date on the home page of an active site to indicate that it's current. It probably doesn't need to be everywhere unless it can happen automagically through a template.
You could also look at it as a "wastes time on bullshit" signal. If a company is spending time updating copyright dates for no other reason, what other pointless nonsense are they spending time on?
> I find that having an up to date year on a copyright line [...] is a "remove the brown m&ms" signal [...] If a person or team didn't catch this, what other details did they miss?
The difference being the brown M&M's test is an excellent one whereas when it comes to "having an up to date year on a copyright line", it's not about someone "missing" these "details", since there are good (i.e. deliberate) reasons not to update the year (and only bad reasons to actually do it).
So something rather like the reverse of what you meant is actually true: if you notice people adhere to some bizarre and misguided practice like trying to make sure the copyright year is "up to date", then what other totally unnecessary (and maybe even potentially harmful) bullshit might they be cargo culting into their work practices—and should you worry about trusting their judgement in other areas that actually matter?
Doesn’t it become a cargo cult, that needs to be perpetuated even as most people involved understand the original meaning in long gone ?
If that’s the sole purpose, a “last updated on” mention somewhere would be a perfect sign they both understand the copyright thing, while satisfying your desire to be reassured.
100% cargo cult. It's just people not bothering to learn every little detail about everything, and the popular shortcut is just to "do what everyone else does". These things have a life on their own, effectively become part of the culture itself, and their original meaning long lost.
Lol right, OP's comment reminds me of a time I saw a dude arguing with someone on Facebook and his position was that only highly trusted research institutes can have dot org domains and if a website on a dot org domain says something then no matter what anyone else says it has to be the true and correct way.
So I registered his <first name><last name>.org and put "<first name> <last name> is an idiot." in just a single <h1> and deployed it.
He ended up deleting all his comments and blocking me but holy shit was it glorious. Best $10 I ever wasted.
A lot of people are way too ready to believe that meaningful gatekeeping exists on the internet and the modern world more generally whether it's dot-org, publishing a book, publishing on Medium, having a slick website, etc.
Fun or maybe not that fun part is - people believe there is meaningful gatekeeping in courts/police enforcement/law.
Lets say for most part all goes well because most of the time people want to do the right thing and are not assholes. Well might be that other people in general are not all assholes - just that quite a lot are but not most :)
But i thought that in legal terms, "maintenance" is not a test for validity of copyright claim. For a non-software example: if Disney refused to apply any updates to their art, does that invalidate their copyright claims? I think one test is time of registering said copyright, and at least in the U.S., the mere moment that you publish a work, the clock starts on your copyright claim/holding (assuming there is no prior art). So, nah, i kind think that having art be "maintained" is not needed to be a valid copyrighted material....Of course, i am not a lawyer. ;-)
For works made after 1978, copyright begins when the work was created. Updating the date on copyright notices doesn't actually change that, and there's no such thing as a "renewal".
For work made before 1978, copyrights can be renewed, but you can't just update a copyright notice and call it "renewed". You actually have to file something with the copyright office.
If you want to start the copyright clock over again, you have to change the work enough that it is considered a new copyrightable work. How much of a change that has to be is a bit of a gray area.
I worked for a small webshop in the mid-aughts and every January we’d get a slurry of tickets to update the year in the footers of a couple hundred websites we developed/hosted.
I asked why we didn’t just do “Copyright <?= date('Y') ?>” and I got a spiel from the owner about how only sites paying for ongoing maintenance get their date updated.
Seemed really silly to me, more than a few sites I built may have ended up with “automated ongoing footer maintenance” for free.
There's probably a modest financial incentive in interactive agencies to avoid dynamically updating dates so a client comes to you at least once a year for some cleanup work where you can try and sell them on new work.
But from a legal perspective (IANAL) my understanding is that dynamically updating copyright dates in and of itself is probably never a legal problem, but the issue is dates in other legal boilerplate (random disclaimers under a financial services company or health disclaimers on a pharmaceuticals ad, for example).
I think the lawyers' thought process about never wanting dynamically updated dates anywhere is that if the web workers get in the habit of dynamically updating copyright dates, they're going to apply the same logic to any of the other legal disclaimers on a corporate site, which could turn out badly. There might be a financial regulation active in one year that's not required in the next. There might a change in FDA regulations and updating the year with the old regs still on the site might be seen as a false health claim, etc. A dynamically updated date in a legal disclaimer can be a major problem.
The safest thing to do to avoid a big screwup is to tell the developers "no dynamically updated dates" ever.
That strikes me as incorrect. If the contents of the website haven't been updated since last year, how can you claim that they are 'copyrighted' in this year?
It seems to me that the copyright date should be updated whenever the actual content of the site is updated (and no earlier).
The year in a copyrigt notice is supposed to be the year when the work was first published. So updating just the year would technically be wrong. That said, it doesn’t matter much since the notice is purely informational - it doesnt actually alter the copyrigt of the work.
If you want the notice to protect against infringing, surely you want to state the earliest year possible. But some read the notice as “page last updated” in which case you want it as recent as possible. But why not just write “last updated…” then?
I eventually did what you suggested. The issue I found with this is that usually across from the copyright is our attribution link, and we'd often have clients that didn't update their website's "look and feel" for many years. The year would be current, and it could make it appear as if an old design was "current".
Your lawyers should be able to easily deal with that, but they might have to do things like show both sites from archive.org or something like that, and take time to explain what archive.org is, how it works, and why the jury should believe that when archive.org says that a site contained certain content on a certain date it should be trusted.
This takes time. In a civil suit court time is limited. Each side has a total time budget for their opening statement, examining witnesses, cross-examining witnesses, and closing arguments. If my lawyers can make your lawyers have to go spend time explaining archive.org to the jury, that's good for us.
And yes, your lawyers will probably have to explain how archive.org works because during jury selection mine will have worked to exclude jury members who are already likely to know that. We should be able to get at least a few people on there who are going to need it explained.
In the bit of Big Blue that I worked in this is what we did.
You only updated the later year if you made a non-insignificant change to a file. Fixing a simple typo in a comment wasn’t enough, nor was just reformatting/moving code. Fixing a bug, changing a user visible string, refactoring, adding a new feature, etc and you’d bump the “to” year.
I think there was also some kind of magic rule that you could put the next year (e.g. 2023) from some point late in the current year, something like you could add 2023 if it was November 2022 or later.
Don’t think I ever saw these “rules” formally written down so everything was just a kind of folklore passed on from one generation of devs to the next.
Copyright years in version/help output was definitely updated as part of the build/release process.
Then my lawyers would still need to explain archive.org to the jury. Even then, I have a feeling that archive.org is not evidence of anything. (Well, may be enough to convince a jury.)
For that matter, the content of any website - or even anything digital - seems like flimsy evidence to support historical fact, since it can be changed at any time. Perhaps this is where someone mentions the blockchain as "immutable proof".
Well the real solution if you want to actually utilize copyright protections is to register the work. This creates a dated government record. In the US (which is admittedly a bit of an oddball), to file a copyright infringement suit, you need to have a registered copyright. No one can get a registered copyright on your work if you've already got one (well they might be able to get one if there is a clerical error but it would definitely be dated after yours).
Without a registered copyright you can still defend yourself from an infringement suit by showing your work predates theirs, but you can't really go on the offensive. You can send cease and desist letters but that's about it. You can't collect statutory damages or attorney's fees.
In most other countries a registration will at least create the presumption of authorship, meaning the other party is obligated to prove their work came first.
But yeah, putting the year on the copyright notice does nothing.
TIL! I didn’t know registration was required in order to seek damages. That sounds suspiciously like a loophole that means the US doesn’t quite meet the Berne convention, no? Or we adhere to the letter of the convention but not the spirit? Looking around, I like how a lot of countries have no voluntary procedure for registering copyright, that seems more in line with the intent behind Berne.
"A copyright notice does not need to be affixed to a copyrighted work for the work to be protected under the law.
Prior to 1989 including a copyright notice on a copyrighted work was required under U.S. law, but that is no longer the case. Although copyright notice is no longer required, a copyright owner would be wise to include a copyright notice because it prevents an infringer from raising a defense of innocent infringement."
Furthermore, a copyright year may not be needed if a copyright notice with (c) mark is included.
So the copyright notice is primarily useful as a notice to others with regards to your work, but has no real use as a legal construct to establish ownership.
It is like writing your name inside your jacket. It might help you in case of disputes or if it gets lost, but it doesn’t in itself change the ownership of the jacket.
Thanks! That wasn't clear from the link (or maybe I missed it).
I was curious so I looked up the list of countries that aren't signatories to the Berne Convention, and it does include some populous countries (Iran, Ethiopia), as well as Taiwan. (Not saying this is important--just seemed interesting.)
1. To sue someone for statutory damages and to have a good chance of automatically recovering attorneys' fees (which helps make the legal effort worthwhile rather than a Pyrrhic victory), when you don't have a clear argument for actual damages, you need to have registered copyright of the work, at least in the US and probably most other countries with statutory damages.
2. If you just want to be able to issue takedowns or sue to get someone to stop redistributing something you made, and maybe if you have a clear argument for actual damages and don't need to rely on statutory damages (which are usually absurd anyway), you don't necessarily need any copyright notice, much less copyright registration, since, due to the Berne convention, everything is assumed copyrighted.
However...
I think putting a copyright notice including a year in static documents is good practice, though, for a simple reason: Copyrights expire. In order to know when the copyright expires, someone who encounters your work needs to know when it was created, i.e. when the copyright period began.
To remove any indication of the initial year of creation is essentially to admit that it doesn't matter because copyright terms are so absurdly long that you don't anticipate anyone caring about your stuff by the time copyright expires.
As a corollary, don't update the copyright year unless you make non-trivial changes to the code, text, or design. Is it really worth it, in some hypothetical distant future where your work is still economically valuable, for you, your descendants, or estate, to go after someone using a slightly modified later version of the work that isn't technically out of copyright but the original version is?
"Expire" is very loose here. Anything made today or even in my lifetime will not have an expiration useful to me in my lifetime. The expiration should be in 10 years with two paid 10 year extensions. Or something. But that is a whole other can of worms and my opinion only.
Updating the copyright date attribution is a marketing tactic to covey freshness of content. Same with the publication date and any dates mentioned in title or content that are not hardcoded to a specific factual event.
I thought the attribution line was basically a public reminder or declaration that you own the copyright the thing it's written on, but not the source of the copyright itself.
Not any more. It used to be true in the US that the copyright declaration has to include the claimant and the year, and that not inducing one or both forfeited your copyright. This hasn't been true for decades and since then copyright is automatic and implicit.
Now it's basically just a textual version of Big Brother eyes warning you that someone cares about this thing and reminding you that copyright still exists before your Ctrl-C into your own website.
IANAL, but some quick research leads me to believe one possible significance is in determining damages in a copyright case. "Willful" infringement has more severe penalties. One criteria for determining if an infringement is willful is it it was done with knowledge that the action violated copyright.
I suppose then, the presence of a copyright symbol on a work makes quick work of any argument the copying was done without knowing the copyright existed. Which, if the accused could successfully make an argument for, could result in reduced penalties.
It also makes audits easier. If a lawyer asks "who owns the copyright to your code?", these pieces of text provide an answer vs random hand-waving. This can be important, for example if said lawyer works for someone about to pay you $$$$$ for your code.
Is "I didn't know this was copyrighted" still a reasonable argument, now that the US joined the rest of the world in automatic copyright over three decades ago?
And remember, it doesn't let you infringe freely if it's missing, just could make seeking the highest penalty from the infringer harder, weakening the deterrent power.
As I understand it, there is no such thing as a work being in the public domain at the moment of creation in the US. Everything put into a tangible form is automatically copyrighted, and there is no legal mechanism to renounce that.
For something to actually be in the public domain, the copyright term must expire.
You could be ignorant of copyright law, someone could have provided the material to you and you weren't aware that they didn't hold the copyright, etc. There are numerous ways you can violate copyright without knowing it.
But ignorance of the law is not a defence. Given everything can be assumed to be under copyright, I don’t see how it can be a valid denfense that you “didnt know” something was under copyright.
> Does the copyright string have any legal significance at all?
It does. At least in the US, if the work contains an explicit copyright announcement then an infringer loses the ability to defend via an "innocent infringement" defense. They become a "deliberate infringer" and this can ultimately change (increase) the size of any damage awards from a lawsuit against the infringer.
FWIW Red Hat has legal advice that we can simply use:
Copyright Red Hat
in new files (I don't think this advice has been published). Personally I think the date is interesting from a source code documentation point of view so I'm leaving it in for now.
The way I would put it: copyright notices in open source projects are typically not intended to function as formally (under US law) correct copyright notices, which do require a year. Rather, they serve different purposes for which the year is not necessary. And if you do include a year, the notice is likely to become inaccurate over time, which will make it formally invalid (under US law). That is not likely to be significant, but it makes inclusion of the year relatively pointless, in relation to the labor that would be involved in attempting to keep the year accurate.
For source code documentation, I prefer to include an overt creation date and separate "last updated" date. Although version control makes including these in the actual source files redundant.
* This simply made sense for books, since you can't update a book that's already out there, just release a new version.
* Web pages were similar, mainly because people wouldn't update them rather than couldn't update them.
* But then came blogs and other dynamic content, which did get updated. So you'd want the copyright date to match the most recent post, not the creation of the blog/site. This means updating every year for any that are still active.
* Other sites that don't update as often then copied "make sure it's the current year" without really thinking about it.
...and that third point doesn't contradict this post. You want it to match "first publication" of the most recent post, right? (assuming you include year at all)
In a former role, I had some SEO responsibilities and was asked to run lots of experiments around dates on page - in the URL, in the title or first H1, in the body, in the metadata, etc. None of them seemed to make a material difference. I suspect Google uses its own first crawl as a created date, and has some minimum threshold for last updated date that's at least somewhat contextually aware, and that just swapping a date out is done so often automatically that it's not used as a signal. YMMV with other search engines, of course.
I believe we can omit the copyright notice completely by Berne convention but there are advantages to keeping the copyright notice at least to show who the copyright owner is and what the first year of publication was, if not more. Explicit is better than implicit.
Yes, and the article even notes this information value to the user. That's why every published book still carries a notice. If someone needs to know, it can be looked up easily. But in a software project that's being continually updated, to know what's covered by copyright at any particular time, you'd have look at the change dates in the code base. Maybe displaying a 'last updated' date to the user might be useful. Usually the user wants to know: is this still maintained or is it dead? Is it current?
I never understood why people update to the most recent year. I never did this as I never saw how it made sense if you have copy from PREVIOUS year...UNTIL I worked at an agency doing client web sites and the agency (and clients) demanded ensuring the copyright notice ALWAYS showed the CURRENT year.
Again this never made sense to me as I would always wonder "don't you want to show you created the content BEFORE today?" Assuming they had past content of course.
Excuse me while I draft the email to my ex-employer and management team saying Hacker News told me I was right.
People read it as Last Updated. If I see Copyright 2015 on a site's home page, my default assumption is that the site hasn't been updated or has only been spottily updated since 2015.
Job's a good'un - if the user has JS disabled then they'll just see the year published as a fallback, otherwise it'll show 2024 when the new year rolls in.
If using a templating engine or some SPA framework/library like React then just dynamically substitute there instead or similar in server-side rendered code.
This caused a minor annoyance for me the other day. The Ordinance Survey (UK public mapping agency) anticipates their map will be the only source for the map you display, so they provide some js that adds a notice to the page instead of integrating into the various js map librarys' way for every source to register its copyright notice. Their JS dynamically interpolates the current year. I needed to translate it into something that plays well with the library I was using which is designed around the assumption that notices are static.
Is a copyright notice required at all? Isn’t it the default anyways and only if you do something like Creative Commons, you need to explicitly state that you give permission for using your work?
I'm actually really curious, because reading the pdf linked elsewhere in the thread (on acceptable variants of the (c symbol) specified that stating copyright was optional for literary works, which implies it is not optional for eg code.
> “Literary works” are works, other than audiovisual works, expressed in words, numbers, or other verbal or numerical symbols or indicia, regardless of the nature of the material objects, such as books, periodicals, manuscripts, phonorecords, film, tapes, disks, or cards, in which they are embodied.
The reason to have this category is mostly to distinguish it from audiovisual works where there's a developed system of compulsory licensing around stuff like paying royalties for playing music on the radio or in public venues.
For them, the copyright year was a marketing signal and they wanted it as new as possible. We had to get guidance from our lawyers on how soon we could update them or we'd have been like car models, like releasing stuff in 2023 with 2024 copyrights.
They didn't care about source code copyrights, of course, just the copyrights that could appear in marketing or product materials.
For OSS, though, the source code is part of the marketing and product materials. So there may be a marketing reason to update them.
We go through this with reports we publish based on surveys sometimes.
There's one report we publish around November and we give it a title that includes the following year for the same reason. (The report body clearly spells out when the survey was in the field but we want the title to reflect when most people will actually read the report.)
On a related note, I remember reading somewhere that you should never just put '(C) MyCompany' in code, because (C) is not the copyright symbol, and therefore is meaningless in law. (whether or not you put the date next to it)
It sounds ... plausible? But I've never heard of any legal case that ever covered this. Is it a myth?
That does not sound right to me. Common law (US/UK/etc.) almost always favors someone's intention over technicalities (e.g., you can sign your name as a triangle but it will still count as a legal signature if you say "this is me signing my name."
One of these things that technically true, but in reality people use it as a recency signal, and it's rumored to be a good signal for search engines too. So it still makes sense to keep it up to date. Even if it's just for making sure your deploy pipeline for an old project still works!
I thought most sites had the copyright year dynamically set to the current one, though I also kinda half recall someone saying that wasn't good practice either.
It's not. The copyright year shows when the content was first published (if a range, then when it was last modified). If the year is dynamic, then it's untrustworthy.
If I'm reading some content in the year 4023 that says (C) 2023 CM30, then I know the copyright has since expired and I'm free to do what I want with it. If it's dynamically saying (C) 4023 CM30 then it doesn't say when it was published.
If I'm publishing something in 2019 with a dynamic date, and it says (C) 2023 and by astonishing coincidence it's very similar to another piece of work by another author that has a static date and it says (C) 2021, it appears that my work post-dates their work rather than pre-dates it.
Mostly this matters much less now and there's other ways of proving publication date but in older media it mattered more.
Isn't copyright based on the time since the author died? Like thanks to Disney's bullshit, life + 70 years or something? Not sure if I'll still be alive in 4023, though I don't have a crystal ball.
Presumably if you know whether the author is alive or not, you'll be safe in knowing if it's under the copyright still, assuming it hasn't had a creative commons license attached or been put into the public domain.
Just did that on my projects with a simple call to:
The result: https://github.com/kdeldycke/meta-package-manager/commit/3ab...