Copyrights, Year Five

January 4, 2011

Every year, I write one post that is basically the same (sorry, Mr. Duplicate Content.) What’s the deal on website copyrights, and should you change yours when the calendar year changes?

I wrote the first version of this in 2007, and you can read the original here.  The short version is that a copyright range, such as 2001-2011, indicates that the body of work had some changes made on one date, some on another, and some in between.  If I were a lawyer, I would argue that almost all sites (except the ones that never get changed, and we all know sites like that) should have a copyright range.

As a non-lawyer, I know that some visitors look at the copyright to see if the company is still in business, and to see how much attention they pay to their site. I sure do that, and I have watched user testers do it and comment on it.

So this is a good week to think about your copyright. Your next opportunity will be when we move our clocks to Daylight Savings Time.  No wait, that’s when you are supposed to check your fire alarm. …

ps, I sent a note to our webmaster while I was writing this, telling him that I couldn’t publish it until he updated the LunaMetrics copyright. When he wrote me back, he told me that not only had he updated it, but that it was now programmed to automatically update each year.