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Comment by sixhobbits | Hacker News Reader

Similarly, I see web developers manually or automatically updating the (c) 2019 in the footer of Web pages. My understanding is that you want to claim an _older_ copyright date rather than a newer one in most cases so this is counter productive except for the small "hey I'm modern and up-to-date" content you're reading" signal it sends.

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By the way, it is widespread a myth that (c) is an acceptable replacement for the copyright symbol or the word "copyright". That is, it makes for an invalid copyright notice, BUT IT DOES NOT INVALIDATE YOUR COPYRIGHT, which is automatic anyway (in the US.)

It is optional (in the US) to provide a valid notice, but if you really want the extra benefits of a copyright notice, the notice must conform to the copyright law. Note that outside of the US, a proper notice may be required, not optional.

The "(C)" is not a myth; it was explicitly listed as an acceptable variant of the copyright symbol by the US Copyright office in both the 1909 and 1976 copyright acts, e.g.:

https://www.copyright.gov/history/comp/compendium-one.pdf

It was used pretty frequently in not only typewritten material but in a lot of computer software before the © symbol was widely available in fonts.

It's a myth as applied to current law, since Section 401 of the current Copyright Act does not allow that variant any more. As the previous commenter said, publishing something in the US with an invalid copyright notice still grants US copyright since the US adoption of the Berne Convention in the late 1980s, but it does withhold the extra optional legal benefits which the notice provides.

Random aside... The 80s BBC Micro required that ROM-based software included a copyright message using "(C)" in the header. The OS would look for those three ASCII bytes in the right place and ignore the ROM if it wasn't there.

Heh. Yeah, it goes way, way back. I remember discussing this back then too.

I don't remember the exact details but a console of the 90s did something similar, but it was challenged in court and they lost

The Sega Genesis required the string "SEGA" to be somewhere in ROM. They tried to use this to gatekeep development for the system by threatening to sue any unlicensed third-party developers for trademark infringement. They were, after all, forced to use the "SEGA" mark if they wanted their game to run.

A federal appeals court ruled, in Sega v. Accolade, that you can't use a trademark that way. They also ruled that you can copy and reverse-engineer a piece of software to determine functional aspects of the console's operation for interoperability purposes.

It's perfectly legal to require a string somewhere in the header before booting a ROM or running a program. (Otherwise, "magic number" checks to determine if a program is in executable format would be illegal!) The Sega case was specifically about using trademarks and copyright to restrict access to functional aspects of your hardware.

The Gameboy did similar. For some odd reason they only verified the top half of the logo, though, so some devs got creative http://fuji.drillspirits.net/?post=87 Technical details here: https://catskull.net/gameboy-boot-screen-logo.html

I'm not a lawyer, but this actually makes sense to me. The copyright on the page is to copyright the page as a whole. When you update the page at all, the new page would be copyright when you update it, and while the old page was copyrighted before then, you're no longer showing that page and so you would no longer show the old page's copyright date.

As a result, the copyright became a decent heuristic for seeing how recently the page has been updated. Then I think some people, recognizing the use of the copyright as a heuristic, would then update the copyright without updating the page just to make it seem like the page has been updated recently. That's easier than actually updating the content of the page, and the only downside is giving your page a more recent copyright date in the notice. I'm not sure what this does to any copyright disputes though, but I think most people consider copyright disputes more unlikely than someone perceiving a page negatively due to the older copyright date.

Good point.

In books I've often seen sequences of dates signifying new editions, updates, or reprints in the colophon.

Ex:

    (C) 1996, 1997, 1999, 2003, 2008, 2016

I think that you want to extend your copyright claims as far into the _future_ as possible.

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