
It's Almost 2015. Update Your Footer - mikk0j
http://updateyourfooter.com/
======
jzwinck
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](http://stackoverflow.com/a/2391555/4323)

~~~
mikk0j
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.

~~~
DannyBee
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)

~~~
davidy123
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.

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stedaniels
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://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ03.pdf)

[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_notice](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_notice)

[http://www.copyrightservice.co.uk/copyright/p03_copyright_no...](http://www.copyrightservice.co.uk/copyright/p03_copyright_notices)

~~~
lloeki
> _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.

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eboyjr
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.

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

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ck2
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.

You could have copyright 2001, that doesn't mean it expires 2002, or 2003 or
even 2015.

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.

~~~
jaredsohn
>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?

~~~
ck2
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?

~~~
empthought
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)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superman_\(1940s_cartoons\))

~~~
ck2
Yes but you could make non-parody copies of disney stories without disney
characters if the copyright expired as normal.

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WilliamMayor
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.

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mrmondo
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?

~~~
DannyBee
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).

~~~
annnnd
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?

~~~
DannyBee
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.

~~~
dctoedt
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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8809137)

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

I actually would seriously doubt that it does.

~~~
dctoedt
> _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.

~~~
DannyBee
"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.

~~~
dctoedt
> _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?

------
nemoniac
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.

------
Kiro
Why do we need this in the footer at all?

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nanoscopic
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.

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mercora
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.

~~~
zik
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.

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everettForth
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 %>

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

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nodesocket
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.

~~~
jzwinck
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.

~~~
nodesocket
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.

~~~
mikk0j
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.

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dennisgorelik
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.

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BinaryIdiot
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.

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jagger27
I'm against using this because I use the footer year as a freshness indicator
on a regular basis.

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

