Comment by floydnoel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by floydnoel | Hacker News Reader

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I see the author here made a common copyright notice mistake.

Us developers as a group seem to hold the belief that updating the copyright dates manually is bad or wrong.

But AIUI, the copyright should be more than a simple "today.getYear()" call. If you first published the page in 2020, then the copyright should reflect that.

If instead, when we delete the 2020 and auto update it to _currentYear_ dynamically, we have removed the claim to have published it earlier. So if there is a copyright issue where another site copied some content but left the copyright year as say 2021, now from a first glance it would have the more senior copyright claim.

What you would want is something that generates a copyright notice like "Copyright 2020-2023". See here for more examples: https://www.websitepolicies.com/blog/copyright-notice

I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding has always been that the copyright notice isn't required at all. If you get into a dispute over the ownership of something, you just need a way to prove you're the actual copyright owner. I don't see how a small line of text on the page will help you do that (especially since you can arbitrarily change it whenever you want).

I keep mine up to date on my sites just because it's basically a staple of modern web design. Not having it would be weird, and having it out of date would probably confuse people.

Yeah, the git history will back me up in any actual copyright dispute. I just have the date in the footer to keep my website from looking old and stale.

Git history is as strong as evidence as a copyright string. One can forge a repo with dates they need and upload it to github. With a well-versed arbiter you’ll probably end up looking at internet archives.

I wonder if some of that is because many off the shelf dynamic templates do the current year thing so that end users (initially) see the correct date. Sort of cargo culting from that pattern?

Or just don't update it.

> now from a first glance it would have the more senior copyright claim.

So what? What matters is authorship, not the date at which it was published on this or that website. Even if a website copies your text, no matter the date, that is still your text and still copyright infringement no matter what if you didn't license this text to them.

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