Copyright and the new year
Here’s a question that came up on a technical writing list I subscribe to: If you have a copyright statement in a document that you distribute regularly, do you update the copyright date for the new year?
If the document is unchanged, then no. For example, if you publish a recipe for eggnog in December of 2006, the copyright statement should say “Copyright © 2006 Alphonse Q. Murgatroyd.” According to the American Bar Association’s guide to copyright, your copyright begins “from the time the work is created in fixed form.” You might distribute that recipe for many years, but as long as you don’t make any changes to it, you don’t change the copyright.
However, assume that in 2007 you add some information about how to avoid salmonella poisoning (in an effort to avoid lawsuits) and republish your recipe, then you would update the copyright date.
If you have a website (like a blog) that you claim copyright for, and the information on that website is updated regularly, then as soon as a change is made on that website, you should update the copyright statement for the new year.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. I’m basing this on an interested layman’s understanding of U.S. copyright law.
Roy Jacobsen
in Legal issues
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