> but it doesn't hurt to do I’m not entirely convinced about this. It constitutes a false statement about the copyright status of the work, which may be illega

> but it doesn't hurt to do I’m not entirely convinced about this. It constitutes a false statement about the copyright status of the work, which may be illegal in some jurisdictions. There are a few unlikely scenarios in Australia where it might technically become a crime, though by and large Australia ignores anything but authorship in matters of such notices; but mostly it would require that you try to threaten someone unjustly before it would become a crime. In the United States of America, I think it becomes a crime to even claim copyright incorrectly (meaning “this is mine and is in copyright” when it’s public domain, nothing to do with year numbers), without even needing to threaten someone. Mitigating this, both require some degree of knowledge or reasonable expectation thereof. So, supposing a work-for-hire copyright term of fifty years (yeah, AU and US are both more than that, but I’m simplifying), if a work was actually produced and published in 2000 and you write “copyright 2010–2020” on it, this could actually be technically criminal between 2050 and 2070 in some situations, during which period the work is actually in the public domain but the claim implies it’s not, constituting copyfraud <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyfraud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyfraud>. (Fun fact, while thinking of this stuff: Australia has mandatory legal deposit of all publications, since 2016 explicitly including things like websites. I don’t do this for my website, and I’ve never heard of anyone else doing it—in fact it was only a few years ago that I heard about this law at all, when my dad started publishing books; it’d be frightfully inconvenient to do for a website, and it’s all rather ill-specified.) So, it might theoretically be illegal in some areas in some situations. And I think it should be illegal; it should hurt to go bumping copyright years meaninglessly. I also just find it funny to think about this practice of bumping copyright years coming back to bite your successors 70 or 95 years down the track, when what seemed harmless silliness at the time suddenly becomes a criminal misrepresentation. ’Course, I don’t think there’s actually much value speculating about specifics of copyright law that far in advance. The last century has shown progress in some areas of copyright (doing it automatically) and massive folly in other areas (obscene and ever-growing durations).