

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


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faddai
Do people still do that manually? I doubt there's anyone on HN who does that.

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cbs
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

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vsync
It's 2013. Time to read up on the Berne Convention.

