Date: 15 Jan, 2009
Posted by: admin
In: hints & tips|internet, web design & development|Search Engines, SEO & SEM
Inspired by considering my response to a post at http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/update-the-copyright-year-on-your-website; this post is biased to UK law but is relevant to all states of the Berne Convention .. that’s nearly everywhere including the US.
Types of copyright notice:
Ways to update your website copyright notices:
Clearly the way you decide to notify people about your copyright dates and requirements (what type of attribution you like, what you consider to be a small excerpt (for quotations), how web links should be made back to you, etc., reflects on the the method you’ll use to date your works, or not date them!
Why not just link to a page with copyright details for the whole site – this is what the UK IP Office does ( http://www.ipo.gov.uk/copyright.htm ). Applying a dated notice is not required to get your protection under the Berne Convention and so since 1989 has not been needed in the US. Nearly the whole world is signed up to Berne (164 states – http://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ShowResults.jsp?lang=en&treaty_id=15 ).
Prior to ’89 the requirement was to label the year in which the work was created, not merely the year of reproduction. That would make it wrong to just update the year on old posts – indeed it could be claimed to be a fraud against the public as you are claiming an extended but legally unfounded restricted copyright period. That only works if you’re Disney or some other billionaire media magnate.
Suppose in 60 years time you’ve died and your family are trying to protect your blog posts from being infringed by copyright denying scoundrels. Will having a date on the page help protect it? I doubt it, archive .org or similar may help.
Shouldn’t we all be using Creative Commons licenses like CC-BY-NC or CC-BY-NC-ND too? That would encourage others to advertise for us by using our great content!?
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