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Comment by GreekOphion | Hacker News Reader

Didn't Facebook just update their website thus having a new copy write?

No, it's a mistake, they should have left the original date. If you update it you are supposed to do year, year, year or a range.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_notice

I still doubt that Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, Twitter, etc. are all mistaken in listing the current year in their copyright. That seems implausible.

Things aren't as cut and dry with legal traditions. I'm sure there are tons of scraps of legal language that remain in use only because it's traditional and few people know any better. Like some kind of legal shibboleth.

1. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3541501 2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_rights_reserved

I don't know. They might have; but I doubt Microsoft, Yahoo, and Twitter did as well.

I quote the US government: http://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-definitions.html

"and the year of first publication"

It appears that you're correct, but I'm still having a hard time believing that the legal departments of almost every major company make the same mistake. That makes me think that there is something we're missing.

They could be counting the year it was rendered on your computer. That seems a bit wonky though.

I'm going to guess the missing thing is that the legal department wasn't the one that implemented the autoupdating date.

IANAL but for web pages, especialy dynamic ones, "the year of first publication" seems to be a flawed concept. You could as well say the page is first published everyday.

About the presence of rogue engineers playing with copyright notices at will in big companies, some yahoo properties go through the hassle of manually updating the copyright notice every year under the explicit request from the legal department.

Surely dynamic updates are "republished" not "first published" after the first time the page is created.

Not unless it's the same content. Arguably if some of the content is old (old blog posts, tweets, etc.) then you should use a range of years.

As many others have pointed out the whole thing is just a signalling mechanism, and not a strict requirement -- "(c) 2012" says, "Don't steal this stuff, it's copyrighted, and we have actively maintained this page through 2012 so we aren't a company from the stone age."

And when the legal department noticed the error they didn't want to go through all the hoops to get it fixed, as legally it has no meaning. Also, as we see many people seem to think that you need to update the year, so they might have done it on purpose even.

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