It's Almost 2015. Update Your Footer | Hacker News Reader

It's Almost 2015. Update Your Footer

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98 pointsmikk0j46 comments

These copyright notices are mostly-useless boilerplate anyway, but if you're going to have one, it should have specific, fixed dates, not dynamic ones as this site suggests [1].

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.

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/a/2391555/4323

That's right thanks. Yes, only the first year when published serves a purpose for copyright reasons. You just see so many of (c) boilerplates that give a year span. Or are there for not copyright reasons at all. But right, having a single dynamic year is not good for copyright reason.

Actually, it's all worthless. 100% worthless.

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)

Can you clarify this? Are you saying you have never seen a defense succeed, as in, a website has been using a name and didn't put up a copyright notice and wasn't able to claim inherent copyright? Or the opposite. Thanks.

Full ack! Also, see the GNU copyright notices: https://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/html_node/Copyright-Notice...

Dynamic dates _do_ serve to mark printouts and snapshots of sites, for whatever that's worth.

Please note: Copyright notices are not required, they are only used out of habit, ignorance, or as a mild deterrent.

http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ03.pdf

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

http://www.copyrightservice.co.uk/copyright/p03_copyright_no...

> out of habit, ignorance, or as a mild deterrent

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.

I do it for all three reasons, but habit most of all.

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.

Useful snippet. However I'd argue that in most cases it's deceiving to viewers of a site to tell them that content was recently changed or has been constantly changing when it's the same thing that's been there in the 90s.

It's more than deception. 17 U.S.C. § 506(c) prescribes criminal penalties for fraudulent copyright notices.

probably no worse off than deceiving viewers that the content hasnt been updated since the 90s cause someone forgot to change the copyright footer.

This is not how copyright works. One of the biggest misconceptions on the web.

Well not unless you are worried about your copyright in 100 years.

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.

>This means if you made your site in 2000 and you died today, the copyright would still be good until 2050.

Based on the logic of the previous sentence, wouldn't it be good until 2064?

You are correct, my mistake, 50 years beyond death.

Corporations get 75 and will most certainly keep getting extensions, can you imagine Disney ever becoming public domain?

The most important pieces of their intellectual property are the trademarked characters, and trademarks never expire; they could probably allow the earliest works to fall under public domain and still maintain a large degree of control.

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.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superman_(1940s_cartoons)

Yes but you could make non-parody copies of disney stories without disney characters if the copyright expired as normal.

A copyright notice like this on a webpage does not serve to assert your claim to the copyrights of the page. You get those automatically. They serve to assist third parties that are trying to find the copyright holder.

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.

Im not sure of the legal value of having a copyright footer - could anyone explain if it would actually stand up in a court of law?

For works created after Berne (1988), it is 100% worthless, except in this one little edge case that has, to my knowledge, never occurred in practice. This edge case is:

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).

Thanks for taking the time to reply, that's quite interesting. I also wonder how this applies for countries other than America, for example in New Zealand you can't actually 'sue' someone, you can take them to court if they've performed a criminal act but I'm not sure how you'd get with content on a website.

Not that I don't agree with you, but it would be difficult to find such case - because most of the pages have the copyright notice. I am guessing that it doesn't hurt, so why not have one?

Most copyright notices on these pages are invalid, so they would not serve as valid notice anyway, so your presumption is wrong (it also reminds me of the bear patrol episode from the simpsons)

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.

A copyright notice does indeed have utility, to the extent that it discourages people from thoughtlessly repurposing your content. Some folks, in the absence of a copyright notice, erroneously assume that the content in question is free for the taking.

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

You make the odd assumption it makes any difference to rates of copying.

I actually would seriously doubt that it does.

> You make the odd assumption it makes any difference to rates of copying. 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.

"with little or no appreciable downside risk"

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.

> If you do it wrong, you are heavily penalized by law.

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?

The court would consider many factors in concert, not just one. Therefore it is impossible to answer this question with a simple yes or no. And someone will eventually show up and recommend that you hire a lawyer.

TL;DR: Nobody knows. You're screwed.

Under U.S. law it does not need to "stand up"; copyright protections adhere to new content when it is created, regardless of notification. Thus at worst, it is superfluous.

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.

It's also helpful to put a date somewhere obvious on all pages, especially blog postings and the like.

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.

Why do we need this in the footer at all?

At the bottom of the article it says "No-© Update Your Footer Disclaimer: this is neither a vote for nor a vote against content copyrights." Stating "No-©" does not put your content into the public domain. It's meaningless tripe. The disclaimer following that just demonstrates the authors ignorance and unwillingness to learn as they imply some recognition that this is odd.

I wonder if it is really needed to make a copyright claim. And even if so, wouldn't it make more sense to date it to its creation? If i am not mistaken, the duration until it would be invalidated is also based on the date of publishing it. Or some date after your death.

The Berne copyright convention states that all content is copyright by default - so no, there's no need to include a copyright claim on anything if all you want to do is make sure you're covered.

People are talking about how updating the date isn't legal unless something copyrightable has changed.

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 %>

For Django, just do {% now "Y" %} in your template to get dynamic year :D

What format does everybody use in their footer? We use:

   © 2014 NodeSocket, LLC.

Is providing all the years in business standard practice?

   © 2012-2014 NodeSocket, LLC.

Using the latest date may work against you, because someone else can show that they produced a work in 2013 with verifiable documents and if your documents say 2014, they will appear to have published earlier than you. If you're going to use a year, use the year the content was created.

Interesting, huge companies seem to only use the current year:

   © 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.

We leads me to believe it does not matter.

Interesting indeed, that goes against the grain of what I read here in opinions and links. So maybe it does matter? Thanks for the list.

Google does not show copyright notice or a year in their footer anymore.

I assume Google knows better and starting this year we are doing the same with our web site.

Are all of the dates within this site dynamic? If so that's genius as it will never need to be updated again unless APIs change.

I'm against using this because I use the footer year as a freshness indicator on a regular basis.

for jekyll > {{ site.time | date:"%Y" }}

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