Remind HN: It's 2013. Time to update that "&copy 2012" in your footers...

FWIW, its more complicated than automatically updating to the current year so doing it manually is actually decent practice. I don't know if there is law that has since settled the matter, but in the past an organization I was at was once advised against automatically generating the mark on retrieval because the mark is supposed to reflect publish date.

Easy example: If you die, and someone pays to keep your personal website online but makes no modifications, your works will eventually fall into public domain (ignore temporarily the likely changes to copyright law), if you're automatically updating copyright dates you're misrepresenting the copyright status of your works.

We use source control and database timestamps to programmatically help determine the correct date(s) to display, but it is still partially a manual process.

A quick google over to copyright.gov

    Omission of notice means publishing without a notice. In
    addition, some errors are considered the same as omission of
    notice. These are:
       o A notice that does not contain the symbol © [...]
       o A notice dated more than one year later than the date of
         first publication