> 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. Thi

> 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