It’s that time of the year when social media reminds us that we must change our copyright lines on our website. Do you need to do it, and if so should be the current year?

Some nefarious folk believe that any website is free to copy. Whilst a notice doesn’t prevent it, it does alert visitors that it should not be copied without your permission. If someone was to steal your work, the copyright line shows that you gave them notice of rights and the defendant cannot claim they didn’t know.

A valid copyright line contains the copyright symbol or the word; the website and the publication date. It should also include the name of the copyright owner (this could be the person who created the work, the employer who hired the content creator and designer or the company or person to whom the copyright is transferred). 

These elements can be any order. It usually appears in the footer of a website so that it shows up on each page. Here's an example: This website and its content are copyright of [business name] - © [business name] [year]. All rights reserved.

It should also contain the year it was published. For example my website switched to a new site in 2020 so that’s the publication date of the website.

The other option is to list the range of years from publication to the time it was updated. My website can say 2020-2024 as I’ve updated it today. That covers all revisions between this period.

In summary, there's no hard rule but you should be mindful of someone stealing your work and how that might look in a court of law. Your insurance may also have requirements on this too and that may mean adding a statement like this to your privacy policy

Any redistribution or reproduction of part or all of the contents in any form is prohibited other than the following:

• you may print or download to a local hard disk extracts for your personal and non-commercial use only

• you may copy the content to individual third parties for their personal use, but only if you acknowledge the website as the source of the material

• You may not, except with our express written permission, distribute or commercially exploit the content. Nor may you transmit it or store it in any other website or other form of electronic retrieval system.

Takeaway

If your website needs updating please let me know and let’s get it completed. It’s free for current clients and part of a power hour for new clients