Copyright notices are not clocks

The new year’s coming soon, and with it, all the people telling you to update your copyright notices, and all the programmers telling you to make your copyright notices automatically display the current year.

And me, lone voice in the wind, telling you, that’s not how copyrights work.

If your copyright notice automatically displays the current year, you are doing it wrong. Your copyright notice is not supposed to be a clock. Someone reading your copyright notice hasn’t forgotten what year it is.

The government has a page that helpfully explains what a copyright notice should actually contain:

A notice consists of three elements that generally appear as a single continuous statement:
• The copyright symbol © (or for phonorecords, the symbol ℗ ); the word “copyright”; or the abbreviation “copr.”;
• The year of first publication of the work; and
• The name of the copyright owner.

You should update the copyright year whenever you make nontrivial, copyrightable changes to your work. Not every year, and definitely not automatically.

If you do it automatically, you are lying to your users, and lying is unprofessional, and I would not recommend it.

(Of course, some people will say copyright notices are useless. To be fair, they’re no longer required, but there are still reasons why you might want one…)