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

by rwmj • 3 years ago

205 156 3 years ago

leetrout• 3 years 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.

richardwhiuk• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

lamontcg2• 3 years 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.

bigyikes• 3 years 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?

rwmj4• 3 years 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.

Spooky23• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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

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).

wongarsu4• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

JohnFen10• 3 years 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.

lamontcg2• 3 years 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.

bombcar• 3 years ago

I wonder if leaving the year alone messes with seo slightly

jehb• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

I'm always in favor of removing lawyer boilerplate though.

snozolli3• 3 years ago

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• 3 years 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.

feoren• 3 years ago

It's a good exercise to try to spot when you're accidentally spreading disinformation. We'd all be better off if we took a second before posting something we think we know, to ask: wait, is this a real thing or is this bullshit?

Here we have the idea that you can do the secret handshake incorrectly and thereby invalidate what most countries view as an automatic right (copyright usually doesn't even require any notice) and that adjudicating judges would shrug and say "Sorry, you used parentheses: my hands are tied. They're free to copy you", based on some random book from the 90s that was likely also full of bullshit. Does that sound right to you?

beej71• 3 years ago

In the US, putting the work in a tangible medium causes it to be fully protected. No "Copyright" required. [1]

And, in addition to circle-c, any of these are valid substitutes in the US for the symbol, according to [2] 2204.4(A):

• 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.

[1] https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-general.html#mywork

[2] https://www.copyright.gov/comp3/

rwmj4• 3 years 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• 3 years 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-... 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.

JohnFen10• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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

“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._Frankl....

O__________O• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

bazoom425• 3 years 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• 3 years 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".

milancurcic• 3 years ago

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

CM302• 3 years 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.

desas2• 3 years 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.

CM302• 3 years 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.

xg15• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

Bjartr4• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

wongarsu4• 3 years 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?

pwg• 3 years ago

Does the copyright string have any legal significance at all?

It does. At least in the US, if the work contains an explicit copyright announcement then an infringer loses the ability to defend via an "innocent infringement" defense. They become a "deliberate infringer" and this can ultimately change (increase) the size of any damage awards from a lawsuit against the infringer.

VoodooJuJu• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

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

joosters2• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

It's a myth. See: https://www.copyright.gov/comp3/chap2200/ch2200-notice.pdf on page 9 "Variants for the © Symbol".

joosters2• 3 years 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.

notpushkin• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

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/3ab...

rwmj4• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

Is this you, Mr. Poe? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law

WorldMaker• 3 years 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.

JohnFen10• 3 years ago

My habit is to use "All Rites Reversed."

That also has no legal effect, but it's fun. Hail Eris!

em-bee2• 3 years 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-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-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• 3 years ago

git log —follow is probably a more reliable mechanism to answer that in practice.

nequo• 3 years 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-bee2• 3 years ago

you don't always have access to that. people can copy the code without copying the repository.

duped• 3 years ago

Until you change VCS systems at some point in the future and it's not backwards compatible with the previous

bhaak• 3 years ago

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

mwexler2• 3 years 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-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• 3 years 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.

mwexler2• 3 years 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).

renewiltord• 3 years ago

Haha yeah. This is the Jedi meme.

cma• 3 years ago

If it isn't required it just pollutes the version control history when viewing change summary statistics etc.

icedchai• 3 years ago

You could also look at it as a "wastes time on bullshit" signal. If a company is spending time updating copyright dates for no other reason, what other pointless nonsense are they spending time on?

cxr3• 3 years ago

I find that having an up to date year on a copyright line [...] is a "remove the brown m&ms" signal [...] If a person or team didn't catch this, what other details did they miss?

The difference being the brown M&M's test is an excellent one whereas when it comes to "having an up to date year on a copyright line", it's not about someone "missing" these "details", since there are good (i.e. deliberate) reasons not to update the year (and only bad reasons to actually do it).

So something rather like the reverse of what you meant is actually true: if you notice people adhere to some bizarre and misguided practice like trying to make sure the copyright year is "up to date", then what other totally unnecessary (and maybe even potentially harmful) bullshit might they be cargo culting into their work practices—and should you worry about trusting their judgement in other areas that actually matter?

throwaway8922382• 3 years 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• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

ozim2• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

mxuribe2• 3 years ago

But i thought that in legal terms, "maintenance" is not a test for validity of copyright claim. For a non-software example: if Disney refused to apply any updates to their art, does that invalidate their copyright claims? I think one test is time of registering said copyright, and at least in the U.S., the mere moment that you publish a work, the clock starts on your copyright claim/holding (assuming there is no prior art). So, nah, i kind think that having art be "maintained" is not needed to be a valid copyrighted material....Of course, i am not a lawyer. ;-)

JohnFen10• 3 years ago

This is all in the US...

For works made after 1978, copyright begins when the work was created. Updating the date on copyright notices doesn't actually change that, and there's no such thing as a "renewal".

For work made before 1978, copyrights can be renewed, but you can't just update a copyright notice and call it "renewed". You actually have to file something with the copyright office.

If you want to start the copyright clock over again, you have to change the work enough that it is considered a new copyrightable work. How much of a change that has to be is a bit of a gray area.

GoblinSlayer• 3 years ago

Frequent changes mean his shit doesn't work.

throwaway8922382• 3 years ago

....or that she's still writing blog posts / adding features / fixing bugs

BurningFrog• 3 years ago

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

Izkata• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

ghaff6• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

Pretty simple and gets the point across.

dewey• 3 years 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• 3 years 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-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.

bazoom425• 3 years 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.

schemescape2• 3 years ago

The wording in that article makes it sound like it’s only discussing US copyright law. Does it address international concerns?

jjk1663• 3 years 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.

dahart3• 3 years 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

bazoom425• 3 years 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?

dahart3• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

Work-for-hire copyright is owned by the company, and they don't die natural deaths.

justinclift• 3 years ago

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

NiagaraThistle• 3 years 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.

ghaff6• 3 years ago

benbristow2• 3 years ago

  &copy; <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.

iudqnolq2• 3 years 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?

benbristow2• 3 years ago

You can update the fallback manually but at least you're somewhat covered until you do so.

harshreality• 3 years 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?

SomeHacker44• 3 years 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.

iudqnolq2• 3 years 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• 3 years 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.

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.

lioeters• 3 years ago

If you had said © 2010-2023

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".

jjk1663• 3 years ago

Well the real solution if you want to actually utilize copyright protections is to register the work. This creates a dated government record. In the US (which is admittedly a bit of an oddball), to file a copyright infringement suit, you need to have a registered copyright. No one can get a registered copyright on your work if you've already got one (well they might be able to get one if there is a clerical error but it would definitely be dated after yours).

Without a registered copyright you can still defend yourself from an infringement suit by showing your work predates theirs, but you can't really go on the offensive. You can send cease and desist letters but that's about it. You can't collect statutory damages or attorney's fees.

In most other countries a registration will at least create the presumption of authorship, meaning the other party is obligated to prove their work came first.

But yeah, putting the year on the copyright notice does nothing.

alexfoo• 3 years ago

"© 2010-2023"

In the bit of Big Blue that I worked in this is what we did.

You only updated the later year if you made a non-insignificant change to a file. Fixing a simple typo in a comment wasn’t enough, nor was just reformatting/moving code. Fixing a bug, changing a user visible string, refactoring, adding a new feature, etc and you’d bump the “to” year.

I think there was also some kind of magic rule that you could put the next year (e.g. 2023) from some point late in the current year, something like you could add 2023 if it was November 2022 or later.

Don’t think I ever saw these “rules” formally written down so everything was just a kind of folklore passed on from one generation of devs to the next.

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

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