PSA: It's That Time to Update the Copyright Year on Your Site

Every year about this time I see articles going around reminding people how to update the copyright on their websites. Usually somewhere in the footer. You know, a line like:

© Copyright 2007-2019 CSS-Tricks

I am very absolutely not a lawyer, but this is how I understand it:

• You don’t actually need that if your goal is copyrighting blog posts. Blog posts are copyrighted (in the United States) the second you publish them, with or without a copyright notice. You just can’t sue anybody over infringement unless you register the copyright.
• People say it may “defer” infringements (but I don’t buy it).
• People say it may win you greater settlements should you sue and win (but I wouldn’t even know where to begin fact-checking that).

Personally, I usually don’t bother with it, but don’t take that as legal advice. I feel like it’s usually included for a bit of swagger like, “lookie how long we’ve been around.” In that same tune, if you’re doing it, it makes a lot of sense to keep it up to date because having the incorrect or an outdated date definitely makes your site look stale.

So, sure, rock your or whatever you need to do to keep it up to date. Just be careful: I just saw a site going around that recommended an inline JavaScript document.write() technique. That’s probably not the worst thing in the world since it’s just injecting a string, but it’s usually something to avoid for various reasons, and I’d way rather see you do it server-side or pre-rendered.

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