Updating Copyright Year Dynamically On Your Site

[scwebmaster]

I have noticed that many sites out there are not up to date with their copyright information. Eithier none of the pages are updated or they forget to do it on some of their pages. You can make your life easier by using PHP.
Here is the PHP code that you will use so that you will never have to physically change the year come every January 1st .


<p>&copy
<?php
$startYear = 2005;//Change this year to whatever year you started
$thisYear = date('Y');

if ($startYear == $thisYear) {
echo $startYear;
}

else {
echo "$startYear - $thisYear";
}

?> My Company </p>

Make sure that you have all your pages as .php if you are using the script above. You should also use the include: <?php include(" "); ?> feature of PHP to call up the script above from a single location, so that if you ever need to change anything in the script, your change will be reflected on all pages that call up the script.

[basschick]

if your page is copyright 2004 and you don't change it, i don't see that it is also copyright 2007. chad around?

[scwebmaster]

Im not understanding what your asking? http://www.boydollars.com/copyright.php

Here is a example of how the script works

[basschick]

my point is if you make a page in 2004, and it is copyrighted for 2004 and the page doesn't change, i don't think it IS copyright 2007 so the copyright shouldn't change.

of course, i could easily be wrong about that...

[gaybucks_chip]

I'm no intellectual property specialist either, but I think Patti is right. I think it's one of those nebulous things that the copyright law hasn't kept up with.

Last I checked, the copyright office did not even consider publication on the web to be "publishing" a work, so, for example, you can register images that you posted in 1996 by mailing a disc to the copyright office tomorrow, and still be entitled to the extra (statutory) infringement penalties for works registered before or within 6 months (or 1 year, whatever it is) of "publication" since they don't count the Web.

So... in that context, I don't think it really matters *what* the copyright date is for a static work. If it's a page originally put on the web in 2004 that you added content to in 2007, I would want to update the copyright notice, but in that case, I would say "Copyright 2004, 2007" rather than just replace the 2004 notice.

And as far as 2257, it makes no references to copyright date at all. The only reference is to "publication date" which has no bearing at all on copyright, except in physical print publications, where it starts the clock ticking for the copyright registration deadline to protect statutory penalties.

[nicedreams]

Last I checked, the copyright office did not even consider publication on the web to be "publishing" a work, so, for example, you can register images that you posted in 1996 by mailing a disc to the copyright office tomorrow, and still be entitled to the extra (statutory) infringement penalties for works registered before or within 6 months (or 1 year, whatever it is) of "publication" since they don't count the Web.

That is wrong/outdated. Websites are considered publications and copyrightable. They will copyright a website if you send them the entire html code and everything on the site. My other company I own, we won a copyright lawsuit in 2001 when another company copied our entire site and just replaced our name with his. We won statutory damages since the site was published within 90 days of when the other company stole it.

If a static page hasn't changed, then the copyright is still the original date. You can submit revisions and updates to your copyright.

Jimmy

[scwebmaster]

Thanks for all the info. I am not a lawyer, but we have one on speed dial and like NiceDream said, all our work is copyrighted as long as we have all the legal blah blah blah in order