Have your websites been dated correctly for...

copyright and trademark? It's the New Year, 'ya know...

[pendanticist]

Was just sitting here with the Honey and remembered what her and I were talking about last week, that I wanted to have done this week.

Add the year 2004 to all my pages. :o

Welp, looks like I know what I'm doing later.....

[jsinger]

I change the copyright date on all my pages on Dec 31. Nothing looks worse than a commerce site that says: "copyright 1998!"

There is no legal requirement to update the date, but it is SOOOO cool to show "copyright 2004" before the competition!

[keyplyr]

Actually, when I see a site that has "Copyright 1998 to 2004" (or similar) at the bottom, I think the webmaster hasn't a clue to what copyright is (present company excluded - LOL.) It's superfluous to keep adding dates and IMO looks unprofessional. Your copyright is good for 90 years from the day you complete the work, period.

[jsinger]

True. That's been the law for many years. BUT:

"© 1996-2003, Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates"
"Copyright 1999-2003 Dell Inc."
"Copyright © 2003 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved."

It took me about one minute to find those examples. All were from the sites' main page. It's mostly about cheap marketing, not the law. Makes a site look current and valuable.

-------------
By the way, note that all three still say, "2003."

[jsinger]

One more: "(c) WebmasterWorld.com 1998-2003 all rights reserved"

I use a similar dual date format. Makes a site look venerable :)

[nativenewyorker]

If you reference your © date with a document.write script in a centralized location, you can update hundreds, thousands or millions of static html pages within seconds.

I agree that keeping the © date updated adds credibility to a website as visitors perceive that you are on the ball and are maintaining current and relevant information.

Ted

[anallawalla]

"Copyright © 2003 Companyname Inc. All rights reserved."

When I was an editor at Unisys and looked after IP registration, the above format was considered the only acceptable format, at least according to the company lawyers.

[John_Shaw]

...it is SOOOO cool to show "copyright 2004" before the competition!

That explains a book I just received from a major on-line book store that I had ordered before it was released. It came December 15, 2003 with a copyright date of 2004!

Actually, I think that the date(s) following the © symbol should be all the years in which material in the document was written. I see many things with ©1995,2000,2003. If much of your material was actually written in 2002 and someone else use it and added a ©2003, your ©2004 won't help much if you try to take legal action.

Also, multiple years makes it look like you have been in the business for a while and you keep the site up to date.

[phoenix09]

Just pop this in, assuming you have php support:

Copyright &#169; <?php echo(date("Y"));?>

Then you never have to think of it again.

[felgall]

You want the copyright notice to give the EARLIEST year that the page content existed so that you can show that your page content existed prior to the site that copied it last year otherwise it makes it look like you stole the content from them instead of the other way around.

You would want to add additional dates to the copyright notice only when the page content is changed significantly enough to be considered a new work.

The copyright date is completely different from the last updated information that you want to be as recent as possible to show that your site is regularly maintained.

[bcolflesh]

copyright.gov/circs/circ1.html#fnv

[moltar]

If you have SSI support you can add the following:

<!--#config timefmt="%Y"--><!--#echo var="DATE_LOCAL"-->

Warning: tested only on Apache.

[runre]

Perception Is King! IMHO EU's want to see AT LEAST the current year reflected in a copyright statement. Without it, their perception is most often that the content is out of date. While I always bow to legal reasoning from corporate, it is often the Marketing folks who drive content - they are 'in touch' with the masses :)