Appropriate copyright date for a decade's worth of episodic work?

June 12, 2020 2:37 AM

I have a website which consists entirely of my own writing. I posted the first essays there in 2009, where they're remained available ever since, and the most recent ones this morning. In these circumstances, what date(s) should I use in the site's blanket copyright notice?
posted by Paul Slade to Law & Government (3 answers total)

Best answer: IANAL but have dealt with a bunch of copyright issues. This is based on US law but I believe the UK is much the same.

The best practice (see page 3), especially to have coverage in as many countries as possible, would be to have the full word copyright, the copyright symbol, the year it was first published, and your name. But it probably doesn't really matter how precise you are. You don't have to declare copyright formally for it to be protected in most countries. As soon as you create and publish it, it's protected. Given the state of copyright laws, that protection won't expire in any time frame that you'll care about it.

But perhaps most importantly, unless you're registering your copyright formally, you're limited to actual damages in the case on an infringement in the US, which for short articles/posts/etc. is not going to result in enough money to make it worth going to court over. So copyrights on this sort of stuff mostly tend to be used for sending cease and desist type notifications or DCMA takedowns, and the like, where the precision of the date of the copyright isn't likely to even be noticed most of the time. For a DCMA takedown, you don't have to give any evidence of the copyright initially, just assert that it exists and you're authorized to act using it.

UK law may be very different regarding damages, so hopefully someone with UK experience can chime in.

what date(s) should I use in the site's blanket copyright notice?

I would go with "Copyright [current year] unless otherwise noted" and put the more specific copyright at the end of the writing you really care about if you want to be thorough.
posted by Candleman at 3:27 AM on June 12, 2020 [1 favorite]

Best answer: I put the year of creation or most recent substantial revision on individual articles (and in the watermarks of my photos), and have Copyright [first year]-[most recent year] on indexes like the home page. Metafilter does something similar in the lower right corner.
posted by JawnBigboote at 6:56 AM on June 12, 2020 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Thanks, both. I appreciate your good advice.
posted by Paul Slade at 11:49 AM on June 22, 2020