[Sigia-l] Updated copyright notices

[Jared M. Spool]

It may not build trust, but it can create a legal problem if you change the 
date.

I'm betting that if I asked our corporate counsel, they'd tell us that the 
copyright date needs to reflect the initial date the protected work was 
published.

If you change the date to 2006, you're saying that you don't want to 
protect it for the period before that year. If someone else claims they 
produced the work first, this could be a problem.

More importantly, if you're adding new content but "pre-date it" by using 
an old copyright notice that reflects before it was written, this practice 
could be challenged as fraudulent and wouldn't help in the protection of 
the content you're creating. Since the point of stating a copyright is to 
protect your work, you wouldn't want to open this door to being challenged.

We use a date range [such as "(c) 1997-2006"] on our sites.

Jared

p.s. Thanks for the reminder -- I'm firing a note off to Josh right now to 
update the range.

At 07:40 AM 1/2/2006, Eric Reiss wrote:

>Just a friendly reminder that this is the day to update the copyright
>notices on your websites. I'm always astounded at how many sites
>still have copyrights from 2003 and 2004. Not a good way to build
>trust...

Jared M. Spool, Founding Principal, User Interface Engineering
4 Lookout Lane, Unit 4d, Middleton, MA 01949
978 777-9123   jspool at uie.com  http://www.uie.com
Blog: http://www.uie.com/brainsparks