10 ms·

TIL: You Can Stop Updating Copyright Attribution Years (2021)

205 points by rwmj 4y ago

leetrout 4y ago
This was always my understanding but IANAL. I brought this up at a startup I worked at when the CTO insisted we change the year in every source file. I gave multiple examples of other code bases at Microsoft and Google and other big companies that dont include the year at all in some cases and definitely dont update every year. He said our lawyers said it had to be updated but I was always suspicious he didnt actually ask.
- bigyikes 4y ago
  Do Google and Microsoft include copyright comments at the top of the source files? I always thought those header comments were annoying. Do they really provide some kind of additional legal protection?
  - rwmj 4y ago
    In the US, if the file has a clear copyright notice then the infringer loses the possible defense of "innocent infringement". So yes there is additional legal protection.
- richardwhiuk 4y ago
  If you ask a lawyer, you will get a "You should update them". If you ask them to justify it or pushback, you'll normally get a "Yeah, no need". If something has no perceived cost, and has marginal utility, then you'll get asked to do it.
  - colejohnson66 4y ago
    It's one of those things that you don't need to do, but it doesn't hurt to do. So managers (and lawyers) will recommend you do it anyway, possibly as a CYA measure.
    - ipqk 4y ago
      It adds noise to the "last updated" timestamp. Yes, you can always find the last substantial update to the file, but now it's not as up front. It's not a huge cost, but it's a cost nonetheless.
    - xoa 4y ago
      Yes, though "CYA" isn't necessarily entirely fair either. The legal system isn't exactly entirely deterministic, particularly if there is a jury involved, so I think the tendency towards conservatism and seeking every edge isn't entirely unreasonable. Cost does certainly have to be weighed against any measures, and particularly for technical issues costs may often not be obvious to lawyers themselves or managers. But after actually experiencing all the stress and costs of a legal case just a few times, and only as a peripheral player, I can understand worries around all of it. Also to the root's line here: >I gave multiple examples of other code bases at Microsoft and Google and other big companies that dont include the year at all in some cases and definitely dont update every year. This is one of those things where it seems reasonable at first blush but then completely not on second look. There are lots of cases in tech where "look these huge players do this" makes sense, but when it comes to either scaling or law things are different. Here I'd be looking for examples of small players doing that, because the big players have such powerful law teams and deep pockets that risks they'd dismiss as unimportant might be existence-threatening to a small company.
      - lapcat 4y ago
        Is there a single case in all of legal history where someone has lost a copyright because of failure to update the copyright year? If not, then you don't need to do it.
        amanaplanacanal 4y ago
        As far at I know, you don't even need a copyright statement anymore. Everything is copyright by default.
        4y ago
  - lamontcg 4y ago
    Explain to the lawyer that these things are hand managed and that dates will slip in which have been copied from other headers in other files, making the years in the headers unreliable, and that if it ever came up in court that you'd have to testify to their unreliability -- while also explaining that git was considerably more reliable and that any one individual commit which had incorrect dates could generally be identified by surrounding dates. That will generally tickle their aversion to putting data that could fail under cross examination in front of a court and they'll be more likely to let you delete all the dates entirely. There's literally no reason for them anyway. You don't even need a copyright statement, but you probably do have a copyright file with years in it, and you've got git for supplimentary info on exactly when any given line of code went into the codebase. Also if you're updating every file every year you're losing the information on when a piece of code when into the codebase, which is the only important thing anyway in the case of patent lawsuits, expiration of copyright really isn't an issue worth worrying about (and I think bumping the copyrights every year is wrong policy there as well). While you're at it, remove all the Author lines as well with the people who no longer have anything to do with the project and their old e-mails which don't work.
- deleted 4y ago
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- Spooky23 4y ago
  In house counsel’s first priority is to not have a fuck up attributable to them. Faced with the certainty that a bunch of developers have to do something with zero perceived risk to counsel, or that there is a 0.01% chance that some negative thing would impact them someday maybe, their choice will be to avoid answering the question or status quo.
  - kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
    Lawyers behaving this way should be forced to earn their keep by registering the copyright. Otherwise it's a pointless flex to exploit those powerless to refuse.
- torstenvl 4y ago
  For corporate "authorship" (i.e., a work made for hire), the term is not to exceed 95 years from the date of publication and not to exceed 120 years from the date of creation. 17 U.S.C. § 302(c). https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/302 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/302 In the tech world, it's hard to imagine that software or content published today will be relevant in a century, but by not updating the year, you are risking the possibility that copyright protection will be cut off sooner (or more likely and more subtly, future infringers will have an innocent infringement defense).
  - wongarsu 4y ago
    I would assume my git history is at least as good as any date I put in the document itself? Though I'm not sure if either my backups or github will survive for the next 120 years.
  - toast0 4y ago
    > In the tech world, it's hard to imagine that software or content published today will be relevant in a century, but by not updating the year, you are risking the possibility that copyright protection will be cut off sooner (or more likely and more subtly, future infringers will have an innocent infringement defense). Small portions of FreeBSD have been untouched since the AT&T sources. That's halfway through. I don't expect anything I write to live that long, though. But I imagine there's some tidbits here and there at Microsoft.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    > In the tech world, it's hard to imagine that software or content published today will be relevant in a century It's not that hard to imagine it, really. There is 60 year old software right now that's still relevant and in use, and there is relevant content that is even older.
  - lamontcg 4y ago
    How does slapping a copyright date on every file affect that? AFAIK the file itself is covered under the copyright of the whole work anyway and doesn't even need a copyright notice. If the file itself does need a copyright notice, then how does updating the date continue to perpetuate the copyright an additional year into the future with no further updates to the text? AFAIK republication of a book with a new copyright date does not push copyright dates into the future. Even if you update a few lines in the file, again AFAIK that doesn't update the expiration timer for all the rest of the code. My understanding is that incrementing the data does nothing for the copyright expiration of the file, and that the act of updating the file with new lines of code is what protects those lines of code into the future, and that no copyright notice is even required. It isn't like trademark where failure to notify and defend your trademark can eventually lead to your losing your trademark. Since 1989 copyright notices have not been required under law, but the purpose of a copyright notice is simply to reduce the possibility of an "innocent infringement" defense.
deleted 4y ago
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bombcar 4y ago
I wonder if leaving the year alone messes with seo slightly
- jehb 4y ago
  In a former role, I had some SEO responsibilities and was asked to run lots of experiments around dates on page - in the URL, in the title or first H1, in the body, in the metadata, etc. None of them seemed to make a material difference. I suspect Google uses its own first crawl as a created date, and has some minimum threshold for last updated date that's at least somewhat contextually aware, and that just swapping a date out is done so often automatically that it's not used as a signal. YMMV with other search engines, of course.
STRML 4y ago
This is good advice, although it made me chuckle a bit that he in fact recommends removing years entirely, but then still has (c) 2021 on the footer. I'm always in favor of removing lawyer boilerplate though.
- snozolli 4y ago
  (c) 2021 Fun fact[1], © gives some additional protection worldwide, but in the US simply writing "Copyright 2021" gives you full protection. Meanwhile, "(c)" doesn't actually mean anything, doesn't gain you any worldwide protection like © does, and arguably invalidates the rest of "Copyright (c) 2021". [1] that might not even be a fact anymore, as I learned it from an excellent book on copyright in the early 90s, when DOS made "(c)" ubiquitous.
  - marcosdumay 4y ago
    > Meanwhile, "(c)" doesn't actually mean anything, doesn't gain you any worldwide protection like © does Law does not work like a compiler. It doesn't just throw "syntax error" when you use an incorrect representation.
    - chungy 4y ago
      "(c)" is sufficiently understood as the ASCII equivalent of "©" that I doubt the distinction will ever matter in court.
    - snozolli 4y ago
      © is an established, international symbol. "(c)" is gibberish. If you put gibberish in the middle of a copyright notice, what does that do? What does "Copyright ><(((('> 2021" mean, legally speaking?
      - MagicMoonlight 4y ago
        It doesn't do anything because courts aren't retarded. Like how I could point a gun at you and say >Hand over the money or I'll gloobensloobenKILLfleubenYOU and they wouldn't go "oh no there's a syntax error release this man immediately, it clearly wasn't a robbery"
rwmj 4y ago
FWIW Red Hat has legal advice that we can simply use: Copyright Red Hat in new files (I don't think this advice has been published). Personally I think the date is interesting from a source code documentation point of view so I'm leaving it in for now.
- richardfontana 4y ago
  This is a pretty good public article on the topic of copyright notices in open source projects: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/blog/copyright-notices-in-open-source-software-projects https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/blog/copyright-notices-... although it doesn't explicitly address why the date can/should be omitted. The way I would put it: copyright notices in open source projects are typically not intended to function as formally (under US law) correct copyright notices, which do require a year. Rather, they serve different purposes for which the year is not necessary. And if you do include a year, the notice is likely to become inaccurate over time, which will make it formally invalid (under US law). That is not likely to be significant, but it makes inclusion of the year relatively pointless, in relation to the labor that would be involved in attempting to keep the year accurate.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  For source code documentation, I prefer to include an overt creation date and separate "last updated" date. Although version control makes including these in the actual source files redundant.
WA 4y ago
Is a copyright notice required at all? Isn’t it the default anyways and only if you do something like Creative Commons, you need to explicitly state that you give permission for using your work?
- saalweachter 4y ago
  I'm actually really curious, because reading the pdf linked elsewhere in the thread (on acceptable variants of the (c symbol) specified that stating copyright was optional for literary works, which implies it is not optional for eg code.
  - lawtalkinghuman 4y ago
    In the context of US copyright law, "literary work" includes computer software, because it has a pretty specific legal meaning. See 17 USC § 101 https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#101 https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#101 > “Literary works” are works, other than audiovisual works, expressed in words, numbers, or other verbal or numerical symbols or indicia, regardless of the nature of the material objects, such as books, periodicals, manuscripts, phonorecords, film, tapes, disks, or cards, in which they are embodied. The reason to have this category is mostly to distinguish it from audiovisual works where there's a developed system of compulsory licensing around stuff like paying royalties for playing music on the radio or in public venues. This point has been litigated too, e.g. in Apple v. Franklin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Franklin_Computer_Corp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Frankl....
O__________O 4y ago
Updating the copyright date attribution is a marketing tactic to covey freshness of content. Same with the publication date and any dates mentioned in title or content that are not hardcoded to a specific factual event.
donatj 4y ago
I worked for a small webshop in the mid-aughts and every January we’d get a slurry of tickets to update the year in the footers of a couple hundred websites we developed/hosted. I asked why we didn’t just do “Copyright <?= date('Y') ?>” and I got a spiel from the owner about how only sites paying for ongoing maintenance get their date updated. Seemed really silly to me, more than a few sites I built may have ended up with “automated ongoing footer maintenance” for free.
- logicalmonster 4y ago
  There's probably a modest financial incentive in interactive agencies to avoid dynamically updating dates so a client comes to you at least once a year for some cleanup work where you can try and sell them on new work. But from a legal perspective (IANAL) my understanding is that dynamically updating copyright dates in and of itself is probably never a legal problem, but the issue is dates in other legal boilerplate (random disclaimers under a financial services company or health disclaimers on a pharmaceuticals ad, for example). I think the lawyers' thought process about never wanting dynamically updated dates anywhere is that if the web workers get in the habit of dynamically updating copyright dates, they're going to apply the same logic to any of the other legal disclaimers on a corporate site, which could turn out badly. There might be a financial regulation active in one year that's not required in the next. There might a change in FDA regulations and updating the year with the old regs still on the site might be seen as a false health claim, etc. A dynamically updated date in a legal disclaimer can be a major problem. The safest thing to do to avoid a big screwup is to tell the developers "no dynamically updated dates" ever.
- Tijdreiziger 4y ago
  That strikes me as incorrect. If the contents of the website haven't been updated since last year, how can you claim that they are 'copyrighted' in this year? It seems to me that the copyright date should be updated whenever the actual content of the site is updated (and no earlier).
  - alkonaut 4y ago
    > If the contents of the website haven't been updated since last year, how can you claim that they are 'copyrighted' in this year? They were updated: the footer was changed.
deleted 4y ago
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milancurcic 4y ago
I've found individual years and year-ranges useful as an indication on when the code was first/last/how often updated.
CM30 4y ago
I thought most sites had the copyright year dynamically set to the current one, though I also kinda half recall someone saying that wasn't good practice either.
- desas 4y ago
  It's not. The copyright year shows when the content was first published (if a range, then when it was last modified). If the year is dynamic, then it's untrustworthy. If I'm reading some content in the year 4023 that says (C) 2023 CM30, then I know the copyright has since expired and I'm free to do what I want with it. If it's dynamically saying (C) 4023 CM30 then it doesn't say when it was published. If I'm publishing something in 2019 with a dynamic date, and it says (C) 2023 and by astonishing coincidence it's very similar to another piece of work by another author that has a static date and it says (C) 2021, it appears that my work post-dates their work rather than pre-dates it. Mostly this matters much less now and there's other ways of proving publication date but in older media it mattered more.
  - CM30 4y ago
    Isn't copyright based on the time since the author died? Like thanks to Disney's bullshit, life + 70 years or something? Not sure if I'll still be alive in 4023, though I don't have a crystal ball. Presumably if you know whether the author is alive or not, you'll be safe in knowing if it's under the copyright still, assuming it hasn't had a creative commons license attached or been put into the public domain.
    - desas 4y ago
      Life + 70 years for people, Publication date +70 years for non-people.
xg15 4y ago
Does the copyright string have any legal significance at all? I always thought copyright emerged from the act of creating a work, not the act of writing a "©" somewhere. I thought the attribution line was basically a public reminder or declaration that you own the copyright the thing it's written on, but not the source of the copyright itself.
- Oxidation 4y ago
  Not any more. It used to be true in the US that the copyright declaration has to include the claimant and the year, and that not inducing one or both forfeited your copyright. This hasn't been true for decades and since then copyright is automatic and implicit. Now it's basically just a textual version of Big Brother eyes warning you that someone cares about this thing and reminding you that copyright still exists before your Ctrl-C into your own website.
- Bjartr 4y ago
  IANAL, but some quick research leads me to believe one possible significance is in determining damages in a copyright case. "Willful" infringement has more severe penalties. One criteria for determining if an infringement is willful is it it was done with knowledge that the action violated copyright. I suppose then, the presence of a copyright symbol on a work makes quick work of any argument the copying was done without knowing the copyright existed. Which, if the accused could successfully make an argument for, could result in reduced penalties. It's not that there's an explicit piece of legislation that gives © power, but rather that it's presence makes for a stronger deterrent in practice.
  - dboreham 4y ago
    It also makes audits easier. If a lawyer asks "who owns the copyright to your code?", these pieces of text provide an answer vs random hand-waving. This can be important, for example if said lawyer works for someone about to pay you $$$$$ for your code.
  - wongarsu 4y ago
    Is "I didn't know this was copyrighted" still a reasonable argument, now that the US joined the rest of the world in automatic copyright over three decades ago?
VoodooJuJu 4y ago
We keep it updated with the current year not for legal purposes, but because it gives users the perception of being current/relevant.
philliphaydon 4y ago
I learned this while working on NancyFX. Haven’t updated any in years since learning.
deleted 4y ago
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joosters 4y ago
On a related note, I remember reading somewhere that you should never just put '(C) MyCompany' in code, because (C) is not the copyright symbol, and therefore is meaningless in law. (whether or not you put the date next to it) It sounds ... plausible? But I've never heard of any legal case that ever covered this. Is it a myth?
- elil17 4y ago
  That does not sound right to me. Common law (US/UK/etc.) almost always favors someone's intention over technicalities (e.g., you can sign your name as a triangle but it will still count as a legal signature if you say "this is me signing my name."
- ddulaney 4y ago
  It's a myth. See: https://www.copyright.gov/comp3/chap2200/ch2200-notice.pdf https://www.copyright.gov/comp3/chap2200/ch2200-notice.pdf on page 9 "Variants for the © Symbol".
  - joosters 4y ago
    Thanks! "Acceptable variants include: - The letter c with a parenthesis over the top - The letter c with a parenthesis under the bottom - (c - c) - (c) - The letter c with an unenclosed circle around it." That sounds like there was some kind of dispute once about a hand-written © where the writer didn't complete the circle, and the copyright office is covering all bases here! Interesting that [c] is not acceptable.
    - david_allison 4y ago
      > Interesting that [c] is not acceptable. Presumably because [c] may be a proofreading mark.
- notpushkin 4y ago
  Your work is copyrighted no matter what you put in it (at least in countries that have adopted the Berne Convention). The reason you want to put a copyright line in source code is to remind the reader that it is in fact copyrighted. I think `(c) ACME Ltd.` is a perfectly reasonable formula for that purpose, but `Copyright ACME Limited. All rights reserved` or `© www.acme.ltd` should also work – pick whatever feels more suitable. IANAL
distcs 4y ago
I believe we can omit the copyright notice completely by Berne convention but there are advantages to keeping the copyright notice at least to show who the copyright owner is and what the first year of publication was, if not more. Explicit is better than implicit.
- Finnucane 4y ago
  Yes, and the article even notes this information value to the user. That's why every published book still carries a notice. If someone needs to know, it can be looked up easily. But in a software project that's being continually updated, to know what's covered by copyright at any particular time, you'd have look at the change dates in the code base. Maybe displaying a 'last updated' date to the user might be useful. Usually the user wants to know: is this still maintained or is it dead? Is it current?
kdeldycke 4y ago
Also, you can remove any "All rights reserved" notice, thanks to Nicaragua: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_rights_reserved#Obsolescence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_rights_reserved#Obsolescen... Just did that on my projects with a simple call to: find ./ -iname "*.py" -exec perl -p -i -e 's/# All Rights Reserved.*\n//sg' "{}" \; The result: https://github.com/kdeldycke/meta-package-manager/commit/3ab54dbac7a49319b8cdd0eb3158d8264f67a8eb https://github.com/kdeldycke/meta-package-manager/commit/3ab...
- rwmj 4y ago
  To be safe we got all the contributors to agree before removing that from our open source code base, which took quite a while.
  - majewsky 4y ago
    Is this you, Mr. Poe? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
    - rwmj 4y ago
      No idea what you mean, but here's the final commit, acked by each of the contributors: https://gitlab.com/nbdkit/nbdkit/-/commit/952ffe0fc7685ea775ed8879bf0b2cb9df3d9044 https://gitlab.com/nbdkit/nbdkit/-/commit/952ffe0fc7685ea775...
- WorldMaker 4y ago
  "Some rights reserved" is a still a sometimes useful, though cheeky, signal for copyleft, Creative Commons, or open source, though. (From what I recall, it started a branding/marketing choice from Creative Commons, but in the wild I've seen it in more places than just CC licensed works.) It's not legally binding in any way, just a fun signal to humans that they might have more rights to play with than full copyright.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
em-bee 4y ago
a more interesting treatment of the topic by the author of curl is here: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2023/01/08/copyright-without-years/ https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2023/01/08/copyright-without-yea... including an opposing view which suggests to include the original year and keep that: https://liferay.dev/blogs/-/blogs/how-and-why-to-properly-write-copyright-statements-in-your-code#why-keep-the-year https://liferay.dev/blogs/-/blogs/how-and-why-to-properly-wr... mainly for this reason: having an easy way to find the earliest date of a piece of code, might prove useful also in figuring out when an invention was first expressed to the general public. Something that might become useful for patent defense so while updating the year does not seem very useful, knowing when a file was created is much more useful.
- vlovich123 4y ago
  git log —follow is probably a more reliable mechanism to answer that in practice.
- nequo 4y ago
  Wouldn’t a VCS be more useful for patent disputes as it keeps more fine-grained track of what changed in the source code and when?
  - em-bee 4y ago
    you don't always have access to that. people can copy the code without copying the repository.
  - duped 4y ago
    Until you change VCS systems at some point in the future and it's not backwards compatible with the previous
bhaak 4y ago
I update the year reference so my users know that the project is still in development.
mwexler 4y ago
I find that having an up to date year on a copyright line (pref a range from first pub to now) is a "remove the brown m&ms" signal (https://www.thewrap.com/van-halen-brown-mms-remove-concert-rider/amp/ https://www.thewrap.com/van-halen-brown-mms-remove-concert-r... or a zillion others). If a person or team didn't catch this, what other details did they miss? So, sure, not required, but helpful to show someone either a) sweats the details or b) knows how to put the year in a generated text line... but at least they took the time to care, once. (Edited to mention range. Seeing other folks mention hassles of code history just to change year will temper my use of this signal)
- twixfel 4y ago
  Alternatively they "sweat the details" to such an extent that they even understand this aspect of the law and therefore know that it isn't necessary and don't do it. The m&m thing isn't relevant here, the situation is different.
  - mwexler 4y ago
    Maybe. But we use "last updated" as a useful signal in many, many places, across code, documents and books, and entertainment. We like recent, new, updated stuff, and we like "authentically old" stuff. As a signal, the date provides value. Having it as "copyright" or simply "last updated" has similar impact in this case. Sure, no one in the US __needs__ to do this, and there is a cost to it. But the benefit of the signal could outweigh. Having no date or an old date may send the signal that "the dev team has good legal support", but I wonder how common that perception is. We see from the comments and the parent post that at least the HN crowd has a good chunk of folks who didn't know that date isn't needed. It's an empirical question to test: does date presence affect evaluation of the object? It would be fun to see. (I would want to try "no date", "last year", "3 years ago", "current year" to see if user perception of the object changes based on presence and time passed).
    - leereeves 4y ago
      Now, having no copyright date may simply send the signal that the team reads HN.
throwaway892238 4y ago
If you haven't updated the copyright year on your footer, I assume you aren't maintaining your website. It's unimportant but significant.
- makeitdouble 4y ago
  Doesn’t it become a cargo cult, that needs to be perpetuated even as most people involved understand the original meaning in long gone ? If that’s the sole purpose, a “last updated on” mention somewhere would be a perfect sign they both understand the copyright thing, while satisfying your desire to be reassured.
  - npteljes 4y ago
    100% cargo cult. It's just people not bothering to learn every little detail about everything, and the popular shortcut is just to "do what everyone else does". These things have a life on their own, effectively become part of the culture itself, and their original meaning long lost.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- ozim 4y ago
  I put javascript code on page so it automatically updates, you're welcome. My site is not up to date and I am not maintaining it.
  - joshmanders 4y ago
    Lol right, OP's comment reminds me of a time I saw a dude arguing with someone on Facebook and his position was that only highly trusted research institutes can have dot org domains and if a website on a dot org domain says something then no matter what anyone else says it has to be the true and correct way. So I registered his <first name><last name>.org and put "<first name> <last name> is an idiot." in just a single <h1> and deployed it. He ended up deleting all his comments and blocking me but holy shit was it glorious. Best $10 I ever wasted.
BurningFrog 4y ago
It's easy to dynamically generate the year, and never have to think about it again.
Izkata 4y ago
So my understanding was: * This simply made sense for books, since you can't update a book that's already out there, just release a new version. * Web pages were similar, mainly because people wouldn't update them rather than couldn't update them. * But then came blogs and other dynamic content, which did get updated. So you'd want the copyright date to match the most recent post, not the creation of the blog/site. This means updating every year for any that are still active. * Other sites that don't update as often then copied "make sure it's the current year" without really thinking about it. ...and that third point doesn't contradict this post. You want it to match "first publication" of the most recent post, right? (assuming you include year at all)
jmull 4y ago
Years ago I worked for a publisher. For them, the copyright year was a marketing signal and they wanted it as new as possible. We had to get guidance from our lawyers on how soon we could update them or we'd have been like car models, like releasing stuff in 2023 with 2024 copyrights. They didn't care about source code copyrights, of course, just the copyrights that could appear in marketing or product materials. For OSS, though, the source code is part of the marketing and product materials. So there may be a marketing reason to update them.
- ghaff 4y ago
  We go through this with reports we publish based on surveys sometimes. There's one report we publish around November and we give it a title that includes the following year for the same reason. (The report body clearly spells out when the survey was in the field but we want the title to reflect when most people will actually read the report.)
gjsman-1000 4y ago
Even better, I realized that "Copyright © 2020" is actually redundant. "©" means "Copyright" and... everybody knows that now. So on my new projects, I just have: "© 2023 Company Name" Pretty simple and gets the point across.
dewey 4y ago
One of these things that technically true, but in reality people use it as a recency signal, and it's rumored to be a good signal for search engines too. So it still makes sense to keep it up to date. Even if it's just for making sure your deploy pipeline for an old project still works!
rexreed 4y ago
From the Copyright Alliance, a copyright notice isn't needed to retain full copyright protection, including on new works, since 1989: https://copyrightalliance.org/education/copyright-law-explained/copyright-basics/what-is-copyright-notice/ https://copyrightalliance.org/education/copyright-law-explai... "A copyright notice does not need to be affixed to a copyrighted work for the work to be protected under the law. Prior to 1989 including a copyright notice on a copyrighted work was required under U.S. law, but that is no longer the case. Although copyright notice is no longer required, a copyright owner would be wise to include a copyright notice because it prevents an infringer from raising a defense of innocent infringement." Furthermore, a copyright year may not be needed if a copyright notice with (c) mark is included. So the copyright notice is primarily useful as a notice to others with regards to your work, but has no real use as a legal construct to establish ownership.
- bazoom42 4y ago
  It is like writing your name inside your jacket. It might help you in case of disputes or if it gets lost, but it doesn’t in itself change the ownership of the jacket.
- schemescape 4y ago
  The wording in that article makes it sound like it’s only discussing US copyright law. Does it address international concerns?
  - jjk166 4y ago
    This was actually the point when the US joined the Berne convention and started treating copyright the same way as the rest of the world.
    - schemescape 4y ago
      Thanks! That wasn't clear from the link (or maybe I missed it). I was curious so I looked up the list of countries that aren't signatories to the Berne Convention, and it does include some populous countries (Iran, Ethiopia), as well as Taiwan. (Not saying this is important--just seemed interesting.)
dahart 4y ago
> I’ve stopped participating after I learned that copyright statements need only the year of the first publication and no lawyer that I asked contradicted. This is true for a work that is published (or just created) and then doesn’t change after that, but there are multiple reasons why one might update the year on code: If the code changes, it’s a new work and the new version’s term of copyright starts in the current year, not the year the file was created. Even if the code doesn’t change, companies may still wish to try to extend their copyrights, claiming a new term every year, which pushes the expiration date out one more year every year. For code that doesn’t change, updating the year obviously might have no basis in law, but companies are free to interpret their copyright as applying to the entire repo rather than a single file, and companies aren’t necessarily being malicious with copyright terms, many clearly believe updating the year is a legal requirement, because it used to be. Leaving the year out of the copyright notice might have the same effective goal, to make the term of copyright appear current at a glance, no matter when it is read. Maybe this will all matter in the year 2173 when the first code copyrights start to expire. /s :P
- bazoom42 4y ago
  > still wish to try to extend their copyrights, claiming a new term every year, which pushes the expiration date out one more year every year. Isn’t the expiration date counting from the death of the author rater than the time of creating?
  - dahart 4y ago
    Good question! The term length for work for hire (as well as anonymous & pseudonymous work) starts at time of creation, at least under both the Berne convention and US copyright law. Individual works (i.e., something you made for yourself and not for a company) do expire some time after the author’s death.
  - michael1999 4y ago
    Work-for-hire copyright is owned by the company, and they don't die natural deaths.
justinclift 4y ago
Wonder how that plays out, interacting with the legal systems of countries outside the US?
NiagaraThistle 4y ago
I never understood why people update to the most recent year. I never did this as I never saw how it made sense if you have copy from PREVIOUS year...UNTIL I worked at an agency doing client web sites and the agency (and clients) demanded ensuring the copyright notice ALWAYS showed the CURRENT year. Again this never made sense to me as I would always wonder "don't you want to show you created the content BEFORE today?" Assuming they had past content of course. Excuse me while I draft the email to my ex-employer and management team saying Hacker News told me I was right.
- ghaff 4y ago
  People read it as Last Updated. If I see Copyright 2015 on a site's home page, my default assumption is that the site hasn't been updated or has only been spottily updated since 2015.
benbristow 4y ago
© <span id="js-copyright-year">2023</span> My Product <script>document.getElementById('js-copyright-year').innerHTML = new Date().getFullYear();</script> Job's a good'un - if the user has JS disabled then they'll just see the year published as a fallback, otherwise it'll show 2024 when the new year rolls in. If using a templating engine or some SPA framework/library like React then just dynamically substitute there instead or similar in server-side rendered code.
- iudqnolq 4y ago
  IANAL, but showing different years to different users vibely seems like a bad idea, especially based on something the user can pick. If it did matter then you might as well just show the default date, cause any adversary could pick to be shown it, no?
  - benbristow 4y ago
    You can update the fallback manually but at least you're somewhat covered until you do so.
harshreality 4y ago
It may not matter legally, because: 1. To sue someone for statutory damages and to have a good chance of automatically recovering attorneys' fees (which helps make the legal effort worthwhile rather than a Pyrrhic victory), when you don't have a clear argument for actual damages, you need to have registered copyright of the work, at least in the US and probably most other countries with statutory damages. 2. If you just want to be able to issue takedowns or sue to get someone to stop redistributing something you made, and maybe if you have a clear argument for actual damages and don't need to rely on statutory damages (which are usually absurd anyway), you don't necessarily need any copyright notice, much less copyright registration, since, due to the Berne convention, everything is assumed copyrighted. However... I think putting a copyright notice including a year in static documents is good practice, though, for a simple reason: Copyrights expire. In order to know when the copyright expires, someone who encounters your work needs to know when it was created, i.e. when the copyright period began. To remove any indication of the initial year of creation is essentially to admit that it doesn't matter because copyright terms are so absurdly long that you don't anticipate anyone caring about your stuff by the time copyright expires. As a corollary, don't update the copyright year unless you make non-trivial changes to the code, text, or design. Is it really worth it, in some hypothetical distant future where your work is still economically valuable, for you, your descendants, or estate, to go after someone using a slightly modified later version of the work that isn't technically out of copyright but the original version is?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- SomeHacker44 4y ago
  "Expire" is very loose here. Anything made today or even in my lifetime will not have an expiration useful to me in my lifetime. The expiration should be in 10 years with two paid 10 year extensions. Or something. But that is a whole other can of worms and my opinion only.
iudqnolq 4y ago
This caused a minor annoyance for me the other day. The Ordinance Survey (UK public mapping agency) anticipates their map will be the only source for the map you display, so they provide some js that adds a notice to the page instead of integrating into the various js map librarys' way for every source to register its copyright notice. Their JS dynamically interpolates the current year. I needed to translate it into something that plays well with the library I was using which is designed around the assumption that notices are static.
tzs 4y ago
If you are going to update the date every year (regardless of whether or not there has been any change to the work), you should probably make it something like "© 2010-2023", where the first year is the earliest copyright year for any copyrighted material still in the work. If you just have "© 2023" you might run into this scenario. In 2018 I rip off your site and include that material in my site, which is © 2018. In 2023 you become aware of this and sue me for copyright infringement. At trial my lawyers are going to find a way to get my © 2018 notice and your © 2023 notice in front of the jury in a way that suggests mine was first and you ripped me off. Your lawyers should be able to easily deal with that, but they might have to do things like show both sites from archive.org or something like that, and take time to explain what archive.org is, how it works, and why the jury should believe that when archive.org says that a site contained certain content on a certain date it should be trusted. This takes time. In a civil suit court time is limited. Each side has a total time budget for their opening statement, examining witnesses, cross-examining witnesses, and closing arguments. If my lawyers can make your lawyers have to go spend time explaining archive.org to the jury, that's good for us. And yes, your lawyers will probably have to explain how archive.org works because during jury selection mine will have worked to exclude jury members who are already likely to know that. We should be able to get at least a few people on there who are going to need it explained. Oh, and my lawyers will also probably be able to get in a suggestion that the fact that your site said © 2023 on it means you were trying to be deceptive about the copyright maybe to illegitimately squeeze some extra years out of copyright protection. That might prejudice the jury against you on anything that is close. If you had said © 2010-2023 all those potential ways my lawyers can make yours waste time or make you look shady go away.
- lioeters 4y ago
  > If you had said © 2010-2023 But couldn't someone copy my site and change the starting year to earlier, like © 1998-2023? Then my lawyers would still need to explain archive.org to the jury. Even then, I have a feeling that archive.org is not evidence of anything. (Well, may be enough to convince a jury.) For that matter, the content of any website - or even anything digital - seems like flimsy evidence to support historical fact, since it can be changed at any time. Perhaps this is where someone mentions the blockchain as "immutable proof".

205 points by rwmj 4y ago

This was always my understanding but IANAL. I brought this up at a startup I worked at when the CTO insisted we change the year in every source file. I gave multiple examples of other code bases at Microsoft and Google and other big companies that dont include the year at all in some cases and definitely dont update every year. He said our lawyers said it had to be updated but I was always suspicious he didnt actually ask.

bigyikes 4y ago
Do Google and Microsoft include copyright comments at the top of the source files? I always thought those header comments were annoying. Do they really provide some kind of additional legal protection?
- rwmj 4y ago
  In the US, if the file has a clear copyright notice then the infringer loses the possible defense of "innocent infringement". So yes there is additional legal protection.
richardwhiuk 4y ago
If you ask a lawyer, you will get a "You should update them". If you ask them to justify it or pushback, you'll normally get a "Yeah, no need". If something has no perceived cost, and has marginal utility, then you'll get asked to do it.
- colejohnson66 4y ago
  It's one of those things that you don't need to do, but it doesn't hurt to do. So managers (and lawyers) will recommend you do it anyway, possibly as a CYA measure.
  - ipqk 4y ago
    It adds noise to the "last updated" timestamp. Yes, you can always find the last substantial update to the file, but now it's not as up front. It's not a huge cost, but it's a cost nonetheless.
  - xoa 4y ago
    Yes, though "CYA" isn't necessarily entirely fair either. The legal system isn't exactly entirely deterministic, particularly if there is a jury involved, so I think the tendency towards conservatism and seeking every edge isn't entirely unreasonable. Cost does certainly have to be weighed against any measures, and particularly for technical issues costs may often not be obvious to lawyers themselves or managers. But after actually experiencing all the stress and costs of a legal case just a few times, and only as a peripheral player, I can understand worries around all of it. Also to the root's line here: >I gave multiple examples of other code bases at Microsoft and Google and other big companies that dont include the year at all in some cases and definitely dont update every year. This is one of those things where it seems reasonable at first blush but then completely not on second look. There are lots of cases in tech where "look these huge players do this" makes sense, but when it comes to either scaling or law things are different. Here I'd be looking for examples of small players doing that, because the big players have such powerful law teams and deep pockets that risks they'd dismiss as unimportant might be existence-threatening to a small company.
    - lapcat 4y ago
      Is there a single case in all of legal history where someone has lost a copyright because of failure to update the copyright year? If not, then you don't need to do it.
      - amanaplanacanal 4y ago
        As far at I know, you don't even need a copyright statement anymore. Everything is copyright by default.
        4y ago
- lamontcg 4y ago
  Explain to the lawyer that these things are hand managed and that dates will slip in which have been copied from other headers in other files, making the years in the headers unreliable, and that if it ever came up in court that you'd have to testify to their unreliability -- while also explaining that git was considerably more reliable and that any one individual commit which had incorrect dates could generally be identified by surrounding dates. That will generally tickle their aversion to putting data that could fail under cross examination in front of a court and they'll be more likely to let you delete all the dates entirely. There's literally no reason for them anyway. You don't even need a copyright statement, but you probably do have a copyright file with years in it, and you've got git for supplimentary info on exactly when any given line of code went into the codebase. Also if you're updating every file every year you're losing the information on when a piece of code when into the codebase, which is the only important thing anyway in the case of patent lawsuits, expiration of copyright really isn't an issue worth worrying about (and I think bumping the copyrights every year is wrong policy there as well). While you're at it, remove all the Author lines as well with the people who no longer have anything to do with the project and their old e-mails which don't work.
deleted 4y ago
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Spooky23 4y ago
In house counsel’s first priority is to not have a fuck up attributable to them. Faced with the certainty that a bunch of developers have to do something with zero perceived risk to counsel, or that there is a 0.01% chance that some negative thing would impact them someday maybe, their choice will be to avoid answering the question or status quo.
- kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
  Lawyers behaving this way should be forced to earn their keep by registering the copyright. Otherwise it's a pointless flex to exploit those powerless to refuse.
torstenvl 4y ago
For corporate "authorship" (i.e., a work made for hire), the term is not to exceed 95 years from the date of publication and not to exceed 120 years from the date of creation. 17 U.S.C. § 302(c). https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/302 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/302 In the tech world, it's hard to imagine that software or content published today will be relevant in a century, but by not updating the year, you are risking the possibility that copyright protection will be cut off sooner (or more likely and more subtly, future infringers will have an innocent infringement defense).
- wongarsu 4y ago
  I would assume my git history is at least as good as any date I put in the document itself? Though I'm not sure if either my backups or github will survive for the next 120 years.
- toast0 4y ago
  > In the tech world, it's hard to imagine that software or content published today will be relevant in a century, but by not updating the year, you are risking the possibility that copyright protection will be cut off sooner (or more likely and more subtly, future infringers will have an innocent infringement defense). Small portions of FreeBSD have been untouched since the AT&T sources. That's halfway through. I don't expect anything I write to live that long, though. But I imagine there's some tidbits here and there at Microsoft.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  > In the tech world, it's hard to imagine that software or content published today will be relevant in a century It's not that hard to imagine it, really. There is 60 year old software right now that's still relevant and in use, and there is relevant content that is even older.
- lamontcg 4y ago
  How does slapping a copyright date on every file affect that? AFAIK the file itself is covered under the copyright of the whole work anyway and doesn't even need a copyright notice. If the file itself does need a copyright notice, then how does updating the date continue to perpetuate the copyright an additional year into the future with no further updates to the text? AFAIK republication of a book with a new copyright date does not push copyright dates into the future. Even if you update a few lines in the file, again AFAIK that doesn't update the expiration timer for all the rest of the code. My understanding is that incrementing the data does nothing for the copyright expiration of the file, and that the act of updating the file with new lines of code is what protects those lines of code into the future, and that no copyright notice is even required. It isn't like trademark where failure to notify and defend your trademark can eventually lead to your losing your trademark. Since 1989 copyright notices have not been required under law, but the purpose of a copyright notice is simply to reduce the possibility of an "innocent infringement" defense.

deleted 4y ago

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bombcar 4y ago

I wonder if leaving the year alone messes with seo slightly

jehb 4y ago
In a former role, I had some SEO responsibilities and was asked to run lots of experiments around dates on page - in the URL, in the title or first H1, in the body, in the metadata, etc. None of them seemed to make a material difference. I suspect Google uses its own first crawl as a created date, and has some minimum threshold for last updated date that's at least somewhat contextually aware, and that just swapping a date out is done so often automatically that it's not used as a signal. YMMV with other search engines, of course.

STRML 4y ago

This is good advice, although it made me chuckle a bit that he in fact recommends removing years entirely, but then still has (c) 2021 on the footer. I'm always in favor of removing lawyer boilerplate though.

snozolli 4y ago
(c) 2021 Fun fact[1], © gives some additional protection worldwide, but in the US simply writing "Copyright 2021" gives you full protection. Meanwhile, "(c)" doesn't actually mean anything, doesn't gain you any worldwide protection like © does, and arguably invalidates the rest of "Copyright (c) 2021". [1] that might not even be a fact anymore, as I learned it from an excellent book on copyright in the early 90s, when DOS made "(c)" ubiquitous.
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  > Meanwhile, "(c)" doesn't actually mean anything, doesn't gain you any worldwide protection like © does Law does not work like a compiler. It doesn't just throw "syntax error" when you use an incorrect representation.
  - chungy 4y ago
    "(c)" is sufficiently understood as the ASCII equivalent of "©" that I doubt the distinction will ever matter in court.
  - snozolli 4y ago
    © is an established, international symbol. "(c)" is gibberish. If you put gibberish in the middle of a copyright notice, what does that do? What does "Copyright ><(((('> 2021" mean, legally speaking?
    - MagicMoonlight 4y ago
      It doesn't do anything because courts aren't retarded. Like how I could point a gun at you and say >Hand over the money or I'll gloobensloobenKILLfleubenYOU and they wouldn't go "oh no there's a syntax error release this man immediately, it clearly wasn't a robbery"

rwmj 4y ago

FWIW Red Hat has legal advice that we can simply use: Copyright Red Hat in new files (I don't think this advice has been published). Personally I think the date is interesting from a source code documentation point of view so I'm leaving it in for now.

richardfontana 4y ago
This is a pretty good public article on the topic of copyright notices in open source projects: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/blog/copyright-notices-in-open-source-software-projects https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/blog/copyright-notices-... although it doesn't explicitly address why the date can/should be omitted. The way I would put it: copyright notices in open source projects are typically not intended to function as formally (under US law) correct copyright notices, which do require a year. Rather, they serve different purposes for which the year is not necessary. And if you do include a year, the notice is likely to become inaccurate over time, which will make it formally invalid (under US law). That is not likely to be significant, but it makes inclusion of the year relatively pointless, in relation to the labor that would be involved in attempting to keep the year accurate.
JohnFen 4y ago
For source code documentation, I prefer to include an overt creation date and separate "last updated" date. Although version control makes including these in the actual source files redundant.

WA 4y ago

Is a copyright notice required at all? Isn’t it the default anyways and only if you do something like Creative Commons, you need to explicitly state that you give permission for using your work?

saalweachter 4y ago
I'm actually really curious, because reading the pdf linked elsewhere in the thread (on acceptable variants of the (c symbol) specified that stating copyright was optional for literary works, which implies it is not optional for eg code.
- lawtalkinghuman 4y ago
  In the context of US copyright law, "literary work" includes computer software, because it has a pretty specific legal meaning. See 17 USC § 101 https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#101 https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#101 > “Literary works” are works, other than audiovisual works, expressed in words, numbers, or other verbal or numerical symbols or indicia, regardless of the nature of the material objects, such as books, periodicals, manuscripts, phonorecords, film, tapes, disks, or cards, in which they are embodied. The reason to have this category is mostly to distinguish it from audiovisual works where there's a developed system of compulsory licensing around stuff like paying royalties for playing music on the radio or in public venues. This point has been litigated too, e.g. in Apple v. Franklin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Franklin_Computer_Corp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Frankl....

O__________O 4y ago

Updating the copyright date attribution is a marketing tactic to covey freshness of content. Same with the publication date and any dates mentioned in title or content that are not hardcoded to a specific factual event.

donatj 4y ago

I worked for a small webshop in the mid-aughts and every January we’d get a slurry of tickets to update the year in the footers of a couple hundred websites we developed/hosted. I asked why we didn’t just do “Copyright <?= date('Y') ?>” and I got a spiel from the owner about how only sites paying for ongoing maintenance get their date updated. Seemed really silly to me, more than a few sites I built may have ended up with “automated ongoing footer maintenance” for free.

logicalmonster 4y ago
There's probably a modest financial incentive in interactive agencies to avoid dynamically updating dates so a client comes to you at least once a year for some cleanup work where you can try and sell them on new work. But from a legal perspective (IANAL) my understanding is that dynamically updating copyright dates in and of itself is probably never a legal problem, but the issue is dates in other legal boilerplate (random disclaimers under a financial services company or health disclaimers on a pharmaceuticals ad, for example). I think the lawyers' thought process about never wanting dynamically updated dates anywhere is that if the web workers get in the habit of dynamically updating copyright dates, they're going to apply the same logic to any of the other legal disclaimers on a corporate site, which could turn out badly. There might be a financial regulation active in one year that's not required in the next. There might a change in FDA regulations and updating the year with the old regs still on the site might be seen as a false health claim, etc. A dynamically updated date in a legal disclaimer can be a major problem. The safest thing to do to avoid a big screwup is to tell the developers "no dynamically updated dates" ever.
Tijdreiziger 4y ago
That strikes me as incorrect. If the contents of the website haven't been updated since last year, how can you claim that they are 'copyrighted' in this year? It seems to me that the copyright date should be updated whenever the actual content of the site is updated (and no earlier).
- alkonaut 4y ago
  > If the contents of the website haven't been updated since last year, how can you claim that they are 'copyrighted' in this year? They were updated: the footer was changed.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

milancurcic 4y ago

I've found individual years and year-ranges useful as an indication on when the code was first/last/how often updated.

CM30 4y ago

I thought most sites had the copyright year dynamically set to the current one, though I also kinda half recall someone saying that wasn't good practice either.

desas 4y ago
It's not. The copyright year shows when the content was first published (if a range, then when it was last modified). If the year is dynamic, then it's untrustworthy. If I'm reading some content in the year 4023 that says (C) 2023 CM30, then I know the copyright has since expired and I'm free to do what I want with it. If it's dynamically saying (C) 4023 CM30 then it doesn't say when it was published. If I'm publishing something in 2019 with a dynamic date, and it says (C) 2023 and by astonishing coincidence it's very similar to another piece of work by another author that has a static date and it says (C) 2021, it appears that my work post-dates their work rather than pre-dates it. Mostly this matters much less now and there's other ways of proving publication date but in older media it mattered more.
- CM30 4y ago
  Isn't copyright based on the time since the author died? Like thanks to Disney's bullshit, life + 70 years or something? Not sure if I'll still be alive in 4023, though I don't have a crystal ball. Presumably if you know whether the author is alive or not, you'll be safe in knowing if it's under the copyright still, assuming it hasn't had a creative commons license attached or been put into the public domain.
  - desas 4y ago
    Life + 70 years for people, Publication date +70 years for non-people.

xg15 4y ago

Does the copyright string have any legal significance at all? I always thought copyright emerged from the act of creating a work, not the act of writing a "©" somewhere. I thought the attribution line was basically a public reminder or declaration that you own the copyright the thing it's written on, but not the source of the copyright itself.

Oxidation 4y ago
Not any more. It used to be true in the US that the copyright declaration has to include the claimant and the year, and that not inducing one or both forfeited your copyright. This hasn't been true for decades and since then copyright is automatic and implicit. Now it's basically just a textual version of Big Brother eyes warning you that someone cares about this thing and reminding you that copyright still exists before your Ctrl-C into your own website.
Bjartr 4y ago
IANAL, but some quick research leads me to believe one possible significance is in determining damages in a copyright case. "Willful" infringement has more severe penalties. One criteria for determining if an infringement is willful is it it was done with knowledge that the action violated copyright. I suppose then, the presence of a copyright symbol on a work makes quick work of any argument the copying was done without knowing the copyright existed. Which, if the accused could successfully make an argument for, could result in reduced penalties. It's not that there's an explicit piece of legislation that gives © power, but rather that it's presence makes for a stronger deterrent in practice.
- dboreham 4y ago
  It also makes audits easier. If a lawyer asks "who owns the copyright to your code?", these pieces of text provide an answer vs random hand-waving. This can be important, for example if said lawyer works for someone about to pay you $$$$$ for your code.
- wongarsu 4y ago
  Is "I didn't know this was copyrighted" still a reasonable argument, now that the US joined the rest of the world in automatic copyright over three decades ago?

VoodooJuJu 4y ago

We keep it updated with the current year not for legal purposes, but because it gives users the perception of being current/relevant.

philliphaydon 4y ago

I learned this while working on NancyFX. Haven’t updated any in years since learning.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

joosters 4y ago

On a related note, I remember reading somewhere that you should never just put '(C) MyCompany' in code, because (C) is not the copyright symbol, and therefore is meaningless in law. (whether or not you put the date next to it) It sounds ... plausible? But I've never heard of any legal case that ever covered this. Is it a myth?

elil17 4y ago
That does not sound right to me. Common law (US/UK/etc.) almost always favors someone's intention over technicalities (e.g., you can sign your name as a triangle but it will still count as a legal signature if you say "this is me signing my name."
ddulaney 4y ago
It's a myth. See: https://www.copyright.gov/comp3/chap2200/ch2200-notice.pdf https://www.copyright.gov/comp3/chap2200/ch2200-notice.pdf on page 9 "Variants for the © Symbol".
- joosters 4y ago
  Thanks! "Acceptable variants include: - The letter c with a parenthesis over the top - The letter c with a parenthesis under the bottom - (c - c) - (c) - The letter c with an unenclosed circle around it." That sounds like there was some kind of dispute once about a hand-written © where the writer didn't complete the circle, and the copyright office is covering all bases here! Interesting that [c] is not acceptable.
  - david_allison 4y ago
    > Interesting that [c] is not acceptable. Presumably because [c] may be a proofreading mark.
notpushkin 4y ago
Your work is copyrighted no matter what you put in it (at least in countries that have adopted the Berne Convention). The reason you want to put a copyright line in source code is to remind the reader that it is in fact copyrighted. I think `(c) ACME Ltd.` is a perfectly reasonable formula for that purpose, but `Copyright ACME Limited. All rights reserved` or `© www.acme.ltd` should also work – pick whatever feels more suitable. IANAL

distcs 4y ago

I believe we can omit the copyright notice completely by Berne convention but there are advantages to keeping the copyright notice at least to show who the copyright owner is and what the first year of publication was, if not more. Explicit is better than implicit.

Finnucane 4y ago
Yes, and the article even notes this information value to the user. That's why every published book still carries a notice. If someone needs to know, it can be looked up easily. But in a software project that's being continually updated, to know what's covered by copyright at any particular time, you'd have look at the change dates in the code base. Maybe displaying a 'last updated' date to the user might be useful. Usually the user wants to know: is this still maintained or is it dead? Is it current?

kdeldycke 4y ago

Also, you can remove any "All rights reserved" notice, thanks to Nicaragua: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_rights_reserved#Obsolescence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_rights_reserved#Obsolescen... Just did that on my projects with a simple call to: find ./ -iname "*.py" -exec perl -p -i -e 's/# All Rights Reserved.*\n//sg' "{}" \; The result: https://github.com/kdeldycke/meta-package-manager/commit/3ab54dbac7a49319b8cdd0eb3158d8264f67a8eb https://github.com/kdeldycke/meta-package-manager/commit/3ab...

rwmj 4y ago
To be safe we got all the contributors to agree before removing that from our open source code base, which took quite a while.
- majewsky 4y ago
  Is this you, Mr. Poe? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
  - rwmj 4y ago
    No idea what you mean, but here's the final commit, acked by each of the contributors: https://gitlab.com/nbdkit/nbdkit/-/commit/952ffe0fc7685ea775ed8879bf0b2cb9df3d9044 https://gitlab.com/nbdkit/nbdkit/-/commit/952ffe0fc7685ea775...
WorldMaker 4y ago
"Some rights reserved" is a still a sometimes useful, though cheeky, signal for copyleft, Creative Commons, or open source, though. (From what I recall, it started a branding/marketing choice from Creative Commons, but in the wild I've seen it in more places than just CC licensed works.) It's not legally binding in any way, just a fun signal to humans that they might have more rights to play with than full copyright.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

em-bee 4y ago

a more interesting treatment of the topic by the author of curl is here: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2023/01/08/copyright-without-years/ https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2023/01/08/copyright-without-yea... including an opposing view which suggests to include the original year and keep that: https://liferay.dev/blogs/-/blogs/how-and-why-to-properly-write-copyright-statements-in-your-code#why-keep-the-year https://liferay.dev/blogs/-/blogs/how-and-why-to-properly-wr... mainly for this reason: having an easy way to find the earliest date of a piece of code, might prove useful also in figuring out when an invention was first expressed to the general public. Something that might become useful for patent defense so while updating the year does not seem very useful, knowing when a file was created is much more useful.

vlovich123 4y ago
git log —follow is probably a more reliable mechanism to answer that in practice.
nequo 4y ago
Wouldn’t a VCS be more useful for patent disputes as it keeps more fine-grained track of what changed in the source code and when?
- em-bee 4y ago
  you don't always have access to that. people can copy the code without copying the repository.
- duped 4y ago
  Until you change VCS systems at some point in the future and it's not backwards compatible with the previous

bhaak 4y ago

I update the year reference so my users know that the project is still in development.

mwexler 4y ago

I find that having an up to date year on a copyright line (pref a range from first pub to now) is a "remove the brown m&ms" signal (https://www.thewrap.com/van-halen-brown-mms-remove-concert-rider/amp/ https://www.thewrap.com/van-halen-brown-mms-remove-concert-r... or a zillion others). If a person or team didn't catch this, what other details did they miss? So, sure, not required, but helpful to show someone either a) sweats the details or b) knows how to put the year in a generated text line... but at least they took the time to care, once. (Edited to mention range. Seeing other folks mention hassles of code history just to change year will temper my use of this signal)

twixfel 4y ago
Alternatively they "sweat the details" to such an extent that they even understand this aspect of the law and therefore know that it isn't necessary and don't do it. The m&m thing isn't relevant here, the situation is different.
- mwexler 4y ago
  Maybe. But we use "last updated" as a useful signal in many, many places, across code, documents and books, and entertainment. We like recent, new, updated stuff, and we like "authentically old" stuff. As a signal, the date provides value. Having it as "copyright" or simply "last updated" has similar impact in this case. Sure, no one in the US __needs__ to do this, and there is a cost to it. But the benefit of the signal could outweigh. Having no date or an old date may send the signal that "the dev team has good legal support", but I wonder how common that perception is. We see from the comments and the parent post that at least the HN crowd has a good chunk of folks who didn't know that date isn't needed. It's an empirical question to test: does date presence affect evaluation of the object? It would be fun to see. (I would want to try "no date", "last year", "3 years ago", "current year" to see if user perception of the object changes based on presence and time passed).
  - leereeves 4y ago
    Now, having no copyright date may simply send the signal that the team reads HN.

throwaway892238 4y ago

If you haven't updated the copyright year on your footer, I assume you aren't maintaining your website. It's unimportant but significant.

makeitdouble 4y ago
Doesn’t it become a cargo cult, that needs to be perpetuated even as most people involved understand the original meaning in long gone ? If that’s the sole purpose, a “last updated on” mention somewhere would be a perfect sign they both understand the copyright thing, while satisfying your desire to be reassured.
- npteljes 4y ago
  100% cargo cult. It's just people not bothering to learn every little detail about everything, and the popular shortcut is just to "do what everyone else does". These things have a life on their own, effectively become part of the culture itself, and their original meaning long lost.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
ozim 4y ago
I put javascript code on page so it automatically updates, you're welcome. My site is not up to date and I am not maintaining it.
- joshmanders 4y ago
  Lol right, OP's comment reminds me of a time I saw a dude arguing with someone on Facebook and his position was that only highly trusted research institutes can have dot org domains and if a website on a dot org domain says something then no matter what anyone else says it has to be the true and correct way. So I registered his <first name><last name>.org and put "<first name> <last name> is an idiot." in just a single <h1> and deployed it. He ended up deleting all his comments and blocking me but holy shit was it glorious. Best $10 I ever wasted.

BurningFrog 4y ago

It's easy to dynamically generate the year, and never have to think about it again.

Izkata 4y ago

So my understanding was: * This simply made sense for books, since you can't update a book that's already out there, just release a new version. * Web pages were similar, mainly because people wouldn't update them rather than couldn't update them. * But then came blogs and other dynamic content, which did get updated. So you'd want the copyright date to match the most recent post, not the creation of the blog/site. This means updating every year for any that are still active. * Other sites that don't update as often then copied "make sure it's the current year" without really thinking about it. ...and that third point doesn't contradict this post. You want it to match "first publication" of the most recent post, right? (assuming you include year at all)

jmull 4y ago

Years ago I worked for a publisher. For them, the copyright year was a marketing signal and they wanted it as new as possible. We had to get guidance from our lawyers on how soon we could update them or we'd have been like car models, like releasing stuff in 2023 with 2024 copyrights. They didn't care about source code copyrights, of course, just the copyrights that could appear in marketing or product materials. For OSS, though, the source code is part of the marketing and product materials. So there may be a marketing reason to update them.

ghaff 4y ago
We go through this with reports we publish based on surveys sometimes. There's one report we publish around November and we give it a title that includes the following year for the same reason. (The report body clearly spells out when the survey was in the field but we want the title to reflect when most people will actually read the report.)

gjsman-1000 4y ago

Even better, I realized that "Copyright © 2020" is actually redundant. "©" means "Copyright" and... everybody knows that now. So on my new projects, I just have: "© 2023 Company Name" Pretty simple and gets the point across.

dewey 4y ago

One of these things that technically true, but in reality people use it as a recency signal, and it's rumored to be a good signal for search engines too. So it still makes sense to keep it up to date. Even if it's just for making sure your deploy pipeline for an old project still works!

rexreed 4y ago

From the Copyright Alliance, a copyright notice isn't needed to retain full copyright protection, including on new works, since 1989: https://copyrightalliance.org/education/copyright-law-explained/copyright-basics/what-is-copyright-notice/ https://copyrightalliance.org/education/copyright-law-explai... "A copyright notice does not need to be affixed to a copyrighted work for the work to be protected under the law. Prior to 1989 including a copyright notice on a copyrighted work was required under U.S. law, but that is no longer the case. Although copyright notice is no longer required, a copyright owner would be wise to include a copyright notice because it prevents an infringer from raising a defense of innocent infringement." Furthermore, a copyright year may not be needed if a copyright notice with (c) mark is included. So the copyright notice is primarily useful as a notice to others with regards to your work, but has no real use as a legal construct to establish ownership.

bazoom42 4y ago
It is like writing your name inside your jacket. It might help you in case of disputes or if it gets lost, but it doesn’t in itself change the ownership of the jacket.
schemescape 4y ago
The wording in that article makes it sound like it’s only discussing US copyright law. Does it address international concerns?
- jjk166 4y ago
  This was actually the point when the US joined the Berne convention and started treating copyright the same way as the rest of the world.
  - schemescape 4y ago
    Thanks! That wasn't clear from the link (or maybe I missed it). I was curious so I looked up the list of countries that aren't signatories to the Berne Convention, and it does include some populous countries (Iran, Ethiopia), as well as Taiwan. (Not saying this is important--just seemed interesting.)

dahart 4y ago

> I’ve stopped participating after I learned that copyright statements need only the year of the first publication and no lawyer that I asked contradicted. This is true for a work that is published (or just created) and then doesn’t change after that, but there are multiple reasons why one might update the year on code: If the code changes, it’s a new work and the new version’s term of copyright starts in the current year, not the year the file was created. Even if the code doesn’t change, companies may still wish to try to extend their copyrights, claiming a new term every year, which pushes the expiration date out one more year every year. For code that doesn’t change, updating the year obviously might have no basis in law, but companies are free to interpret their copyright as applying to the entire repo rather than a single file, and companies aren’t necessarily being malicious with copyright terms, many clearly believe updating the year is a legal requirement, because it used to be. Leaving the year out of the copyright notice might have the same effective goal, to make the term of copyright appear current at a glance, no matter when it is read. Maybe this will all matter in the year 2173 when the first code copyrights start to expire. /s :P

bazoom42 4y ago
> still wish to try to extend their copyrights, claiming a new term every year, which pushes the expiration date out one more year every year. Isn’t the expiration date counting from the death of the author rater than the time of creating?
- dahart 4y ago
  Good question! The term length for work for hire (as well as anonymous & pseudonymous work) starts at time of creation, at least under both the Berne convention and US copyright law. Individual works (i.e., something you made for yourself and not for a company) do expire some time after the author’s death.
- michael1999 4y ago
  Work-for-hire copyright is owned by the company, and they don't die natural deaths.

justinclift 4y ago

Wonder how that plays out, interacting with the legal systems of countries outside the US?

NiagaraThistle 4y ago

I never understood why people update to the most recent year. I never did this as I never saw how it made sense if you have copy from PREVIOUS year...UNTIL I worked at an agency doing client web sites and the agency (and clients) demanded ensuring the copyright notice ALWAYS showed the CURRENT year. Again this never made sense to me as I would always wonder "don't you want to show you created the content BEFORE today?" Assuming they had past content of course. Excuse me while I draft the email to my ex-employer and management team saying Hacker News told me I was right.

ghaff 4y ago
People read it as Last Updated. If I see Copyright 2015 on a site's home page, my default assumption is that the site hasn't been updated or has only been spottily updated since 2015.

benbristow 4y ago

© <span id="js-copyright-year">2023</span> My Product <script>document.getElementById('js-copyright-year').innerHTML = new Date().getFullYear();</script> Job's a good'un - if the user has JS disabled then they'll just see the year published as a fallback, otherwise it'll show 2024 when the new year rolls in. If using a templating engine or some SPA framework/library like React then just dynamically substitute there instead or similar in server-side rendered code.

iudqnolq 4y ago
IANAL, but showing different years to different users vibely seems like a bad idea, especially based on something the user can pick. If it did matter then you might as well just show the default date, cause any adversary could pick to be shown it, no?
- benbristow 4y ago
  You can update the fallback manually but at least you're somewhat covered until you do so.

harshreality 4y ago

It may not matter legally, because: 1. To sue someone for statutory damages and to have a good chance of automatically recovering attorneys' fees (which helps make the legal effort worthwhile rather than a Pyrrhic victory), when you don't have a clear argument for actual damages, you need to have registered copyright of the work, at least in the US and probably most other countries with statutory damages. 2. If you just want to be able to issue takedowns or sue to get someone to stop redistributing something you made, and maybe if you have a clear argument for actual damages and don't need to rely on statutory damages (which are usually absurd anyway), you don't necessarily need any copyright notice, much less copyright registration, since, due to the Berne convention, everything is assumed copyrighted. However... I think putting a copyright notice including a year in static documents is good practice, though, for a simple reason: Copyrights expire. In order to know when the copyright expires, someone who encounters your work needs to know when it was created, i.e. when the copyright period began. To remove any indication of the initial year of creation is essentially to admit that it doesn't matter because copyright terms are so absurdly long that you don't anticipate anyone caring about your stuff by the time copyright expires. As a corollary, don't update the copyright year unless you make non-trivial changes to the code, text, or design. Is it really worth it, in some hypothetical distant future where your work is still economically valuable, for you, your descendants, or estate, to go after someone using a slightly modified later version of the work that isn't technically out of copyright but the original version is?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
SomeHacker44 4y ago
"Expire" is very loose here. Anything made today or even in my lifetime will not have an expiration useful to me in my lifetime. The expiration should be in 10 years with two paid 10 year extensions. Or something. But that is a whole other can of worms and my opinion only.

iudqnolq 4y ago

This caused a minor annoyance for me the other day. The Ordinance Survey (UK public mapping agency) anticipates their map will be the only source for the map you display, so they provide some js that adds a notice to the page instead of integrating into the various js map librarys' way for every source to register its copyright notice. Their JS dynamically interpolates the current year. I needed to translate it into something that plays well with the library I was using which is designed around the assumption that notices are static.

tzs 4y ago

If you are going to update the date every year (regardless of whether or not there has been any change to the work), you should probably make it something like "© 2010-2023", where the first year is the earliest copyright year for any copyrighted material still in the work. If you just have "© 2023" you might run into this scenario. In 2018 I rip off your site and include that material in my site, which is © 2018. In 2023 you become aware of this and sue me for copyright infringement. At trial my lawyers are going to find a way to get my © 2018 notice and your © 2023 notice in front of the jury in a way that suggests mine was first and you ripped me off. Your lawyers should be able to easily deal with that, but they might have to do things like show both sites from archive.org or something like that, and take time to explain what archive.org is, how it works, and why the jury should believe that when archive.org says that a site contained certain content on a certain date it should be trusted. This takes time. In a civil suit court time is limited. Each side has a total time budget for their opening statement, examining witnesses, cross-examining witnesses, and closing arguments. If my lawyers can make your lawyers have to go spend time explaining archive.org to the jury, that's good for us. And yes, your lawyers will probably have to explain how archive.org works because during jury selection mine will have worked to exclude jury members who are already likely to know that. We should be able to get at least a few people on there who are going to need it explained. Oh, and my lawyers will also probably be able to get in a suggestion that the fact that your site said © 2023 on it means you were trying to be deceptive about the copyright maybe to illegitimately squeeze some extra years out of copyright protection. That might prejudice the jury against you on anything that is close. If you had said © 2010-2023 all those potential ways my lawyers can make yours waste time or make you look shady go away.

lioeters 4y ago
> If you had said © 2010-2023 But couldn't someone copy my site and change the starting year to earlier, like © 1998-2023? Then my lawyers would still need to explain archive.org to the jury. Even then, I have a feeling that archive.org is not evidence of anything. (Well, may be enough to convince a jury.) For that matter, the content of any website - or even anything digital - seems like flimsy evidence to support historical fact, since it can be changed at any time. Perhaps this is where someone mentions the blockchain as "immutable proof".