Copyright notice dates

website dates for old offline content

[varya]

I'm in the process of developing a website which will have an archive of my writing going back 20+ years.

Normally, on my websites, I just start the copyright year with the year I created the content for the site and then I change it to a date range after the first year. 2001-2005 or whatever.

So this website is brand new, so the copyright for the site itself is this year. But some of the content goes back to the early 1980s. I'm not sure if it'd be better to list the date range 1982-2005, or just start it with this year, as I usually do.

I certainly do not want to imply that I didn't old the rights to those pieces prior to this year.

[hunderdown]

Why put a range? You could put "Copyright 1987 and 2005" for example.

[JayC]

If any copyrighted work is a compilation of previously published material, the year date of first publication of that compilation is sufficient in the copyright notice.