It's one of those things that you don't need to do, but it doesn't hurt to do. So managers (and lawyers) will recommend you do it anyway, possibly as a CYA measure.
They can suck the air out of actual understanding of the legal situation at hand and, in the worst case, lead to an warped understanding of copyright that interacts with the world with supposed magical incantations that are legally totally meaningless or even the opposite of the truth. (I’m thinking of those YouTube videos e.g. showing some snippet of a film uploaded by someone who doesn’t have the copyright with the totally bonkers “copyright Universal 2020, no infringement intended” note. I know, that‘s mostly about someone who is not a business and who usually doesn’t have anything to do with copyright being confused about the difference between attribution and copyright and thinking giving attribution gives you copyright – which is bonkers. Fair use does require attribution, but simply copying something verbatim is certainly not fair use.)
Especially when people talk about professions like lawyers, etc. it's almost as if they conceive of it as one unified workforce of hypercompetent experts who all know The Truth and can either tell you what it is or, failing that, then at least tell you what you should do in accordance with what The Truth is. But no industry works like that.
Think of how many programmers you know or know of and the range of competencies involved, including absurd practices and just outright weird opinions/positions held by a surprisingly large proportion of folks. Half these people are B- players at best and who are only there because they figured out how to make a living following rituals—which they may not necessarily understand (and some of which may actually be counterproductive but are inoffensive in the sense that they aren't so counterproductive that it will result in being let go).
Or forget that for a moment and just think of how many cases have been tried in court with lawyers on both sides. Do the courts regularly arrive at decisions that recognize counsel for both sides as being right (and it's just, say, the facts that are responsible for their clients losing the cases)? Or can you regularly find lawyers putting forth legal theories that simply don't hold up under scrutiny?
Except it does. It requires an engineer to maintain the dates, and the company to audit that the dates are correct. It directly interferes with source control ("updated copyright" was the bane of my existence when trying to git-bisect a few years ago).
Edit: as the article mentions open source documentation it’s possible the repo itself is what needs the year, and there’s no way around hardcoding it in the included licence.
I'll probably continue to include copyright notices and years regardless of legal necessity, but I've never lost sleep over it or put a lot of effort into it. It just seems like a "does no harm, and may clarify things" sort of deal.
This is pretty much the advice of my attorney. "It's not legally required, but I can imagine situations where it could be useful anyway. If it doesn't cost you anything, why not include it?"
Also to the root's line here:
>I gave multiple examples of other code bases at Microsoft and Google and other big companies that dont include the year at all in some cases and definitely dont update every year.
This is one of those things where it seems reasonable at first blush but then completely not on second look. There are lots of cases in tech where "look these huge players do this" makes sense, but when it comes to either scaling or law things are different. Here I'd be looking for examples of small players doing that, because the big players have such powerful law teams and deep pockets that risks they'd dismiss as unimportant might be existence-threatening to a small company.
If not, then you don't need to do it.
In the US, copyright is a thing that applies the moment you have put a work into a fixed, tangible form. Actual publication is not required. If your work is copied, you can sue. But if you register it, you have some additional power and -- perhaps most importantly -- you don't have to worry about a court fight over when the copyright term began. A registered copyright began at the date in the copyright registration. There can be no argument about that.
Some of the other benefits... if you register your copyright, you can sue for statutory damages rather than having to demonstrate actual damages and you gain the ability to recover legal expenses.
Post-1976, screwing up copyright formalities means relatively little in copyright (the biggest thing is you lose the ability to sue for statutory damages if you don't register copyright). Eventually, there's going to be legal confusion over what year protections run out, but that isn't going to be relevant for software until quite late this century thanks to the current 95-year copyright regimes.
But that is not the same thing as updating the copyright year on a copyright notice, and you know it.
A film like "It's a Wonderful Life" is a finished work that never changes, unlike software or web sites. In every film, the copyright notice in the credits will remain forever the same. It can't be changed without editing the film ex post facto a la Steven Spielberg or George Lucas. Even if the copyright of "It's a Wonderful Life" had been renewed, the copyright notice in the credits would not have changed.
It's not a huge cost, but it's a cost nonetheless.
I’m not entirely convinced about this. It constitutes a false statement about the copyright status of the work, which may be illegal in some jurisdictions. There are a few unlikely scenarios in Australia where it might technically become a crime, though by and large Australia ignores anything but authorship in matters of such notices; but mostly it would require that you try to threaten someone unjustly before it would become a crime. In the United States of America, I think it becomes a crime to even claim copyright incorrectly (meaning “this is mine and is in copyright” when it’s public domain, nothing to do with year numbers), without even needing to threaten someone. Mitigating this, both require some degree of knowledge or reasonable expectation thereof.
So, supposing a work-for-hire copyright term of fifty years (yeah, AU and US are both more than that, but I’m simplifying), if a work was actually produced and published in 2000 and you write “copyright 2010–2020” on it, this could actually be technically criminal between 2050 and 2070 in some situations, during which period the work is actually in the public domain but the claim implies it’s not, constituting copyfraud <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyfraud>.
(Fun fact, while thinking of this stuff: Australia has mandatory legal deposit of all publications, since 2016 explicitly including things like websites. I don’t do this for my website, and I’ve never heard of anyone else doing it—in fact it was only a few years ago that I heard about this law at all, when my dad started publishing books; it’d be frightfully inconvenient to do for a website, and it’s all rather ill-specified.)
So, it might theoretically be illegal in some areas in some situations. And I think it should be illegal; it should hurt to go bumping copyright years meaninglessly.
I also just find it funny to think about this practice of bumping copyright years coming back to bite your successors 70 or 95 years down the track, when what seemed harmless silliness at the time suddenly becomes a criminal misrepresentation. ’Course, I don’t think there’s actually much value speculating about specifics of copyright law that far in advance. The last century has shown progress in some areas of copyright (doing it automatically) and massive folly in other areas (obscene and ever-growing durations).
Apparently CYA stands for: "cover your ass".