It appears that you're correct, but I'm still having a hard time believing that the legal departments of almost every major company make the same mistake. That makes me think that there is something we're missing.
About the presence of rogue engineers playing with copyright notices at will in big companies, some yahoo properties go through the hassle of manually updating the copyright notice every year under the explicit request from the legal department.
As many others have pointed out the whole thing is just a signalling mechanism, and not a strict requirement -- "(c) 2012" says, "Don't steal this stuff, it's copyrighted, and we have actively maintained this page through 2012 so we aren't a company from the stone age."