3 ms·

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

by 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.
  - wongarsu 4y ago
    I doubt that passes the threshold of originality. All actually copyrighted content is still the same as the year before.
- bazoom42 4y ago
  The year in a copyrigt notice is supposed to be the year when the work was first published. So updating just the year would technically be wrong. That said, it doesn’t matter much since the notice is purely informational - it doesnt actually alter the copyrigt of the work. If you want the notice to protect against infringing, surely you want to state the earliest year possible. But some read the notice as “page last updated” in which case you want it as recent as possible. But why not just write “last updated…” then?
progmetaldev 4y ago
I eventually did what you suggested. The issue I found with this is that usually across from the copyright is our attribution link, and we'd often have clients that didn't update their website's "look and feel" for many years. The year would be current, and it could make it appear as if an old design was "current".

by donatj 4y ago

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.
- wongarsu 4y ago
  I doubt that passes the threshold of originality. All actually copyrighted content is still the same as the year before.
bazoom42 4y ago
The year in a copyrigt notice is supposed to be the year when the work was first published. So updating just the year would technically be wrong. That said, it doesn’t matter much since the notice is purely informational - it doesnt actually alter the copyrigt of the work. If you want the notice to protect against infringing, surely you want to state the earliest year possible. But some read the notice as “page last updated” in which case you want it as recent as possible. But why not just write “last updated…” then?

progmetaldev 4y ago

I eventually did what you suggested. The issue I found with this is that usually across from the copyright is our attribution link, and we'd often have clients that didn't update their website's "look and feel" for many years. The year would be current, and it could make it appear as if an old design was "current".