New year, new date?
It’s the beginning of January. All across social media there are people talking about their resolutions, people talking about how they are against having resolutions and people saying it’s so much better to set intentions instead. In amongst all that you might have seen a few people reminding you to update the date in the copyright notice on your website.
Have you done it yet? Feeling all smug?
Well don’t.
You shouldn’t have.
Want to know what you need to do to assert your copyright over your work?
Nothing.
It’s automatic under UK law and the Berne Convention (whatever that is).
Do I need a copyright notice on my website?
Like I said, you don’t have to have a notice at all. You’re automatically covered, so you can make your footer (that bit at the bottom of your website) less cluttered and take it out altogether.
You might want to put a notice there, just to feel all official, or to be like one of those ugly window stickers declaring which alarm brand you have installed. Totally up to you, but remember it isn’t a legally binding thing at all.
Side note: if you’ve used stock images or embedded someone else’s video or something similar, that actually isn’t your intellectual property, so your notice will be a lie! Is it a lie that will get you into legal trouble? I wouldn’t have thoughts so. But here’s where we really hit up against the “I’m not actually a lawyer” wall. And by the way that is a caveat that covers this whole page.
What date should I put in my copyright notice?
If you really want to have one, and want to put a date in, it should be the date of publication. That’s the year you launched it into the world.
If you think about it, that makes sense. And why it doesn’t make sense to update this to the current year.
Imagine you published your site in 2021. You’ve diligently changed the year in your footer every January 1st. But some rapscallion ripped off the entire content of your site in 2022, which is the year they have left in their footer. When you try and call them out you’ll look a bit silly, because the dates indicate that their site was published first and yours was freshly minted in 2025.
If it came to a court battle, these dates wouldn’t matter, as the notice doesn’t have legal weight. But I imagine it would help your case if you can use the Wayback Machine or something to show your site existing before theirs, with the date of publication always saying 2021.
But doesn’t Google like this year’s date?
I’ve seen a few people suggesting that you will be penalised by search engines for looking ‘out of date’. While it’s true that regularly updating the content on your site is good for SEO, this is more to do with page content and blog posts. Not four digits in your footer.
I asked SEO expert Nikki Pilkington and she said “Search engines don’t give a shit what date is in your copyright notice”. So there you go.
How can I look up-to-date?
You might be concerned that having a date which is several years in the past makes visitors think the site is abandoned or defunct. Because there is such widespread misunderstanding about these notices, who knows, you might be right. Also, if you are regularly adding new content like blog posts, some of the material was indeed published more recently. In this case you can put a date range. So the example website above would have ©2021-2025.
If you choose to do this, you will want to update that second date in the range every year. To save you hassle, you can get a bit of code or a plugin which does it automatically. But my recommendation is, to save you the most hassle (and save you adding another unnecessary blimmin plugin), just put “© [your business name], all rights reserved”. No date.
Save yourself a job
Delete it or remove the date to save yourself a yearly task.
I’ve resigned myself to the fact that promoting this post and mentioning it in my newsletter will be my yearly task from now on. You’re welcome, world.