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I have this project that has several license notes (all GNU GPLv3) on the top of the source files.

They are all following the "rule" that the year in the copyright notice should be the year on which the file was last modified.

I wonder if I can substitute

Copyright (C) 201X Bernardo Sulzbach

by

Copyright (C) Bernardo Sulzbach

on all the licenses to alleviate the maintenance burden.

Bernardo Sulzbach
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2 Answers2

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No, you can not leave out the year in a copyright notice. The format of a copyright notice is fairly rigidly specified and if you deviate from that, the notice might not be accepted as a valid copyright notice.

From UK Copyright Service fact sheet:

  1. What does a notice consist of?

    1. "Copyright"
      Some countries will not accept the symbol alone, they also require the word "Copyright" to appear in order to consider the notice valid. Using the word ensures that there can be no confusion.
    2. "©"
      The normally recognised symbol. Most countries across the world accept this as the correct manner of displaying copyright.

    3. Year of publication
      In case of a dispute of ownership of a work, the date plays an important part. If your work was developed and published before any potential opponents then you can usually expect to win any case which challenges your rights.

      In the case of work which is continually updated, (for example a web site), the year of publication may be shown as a period from first publication until the most recent update, (i.e. 2000-2015)

    4. Copyright owner’s name
      This may only be one person, or it may be a collective, a band, group or team for example.

      If there is one person who owns the rights to a work, then his/her name will appear on its own. If however, your work is owned by several people then you may choose to include the name of each member of the collective, or include the name of the collective itself.

This would give your copyright notice the following appearance: Copyright © 2015 Bobby Smith.

Bart van Ingen Schenau
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Legal Disclaimer. I'm not an attorney. The following should not be construed as legal advice.

They are all following the "rule" that the year in the copyright notice should be the year on which the file was last modified.

A single date on the notice establishes how far back the claim is made (also), so you shouldn't substitute:

Copyright (C) 2015 Bernardo Sulzbach

by

Copyright (C) 2016 Bernardo Sulzbach

You should let it unchanged (typically your individual copyright will extend from 50 to 100 years beyond your death) or write

Copyright (C) 2015-2016 Bernardo Sulzbach

In the hyphenated form, the first date and the second date serve different purposes:

The last date serves to indicate the latest copyright date for any material in the file

Moreover you should update the copyright year only if you made contributions to the work during that year. So if a file hasn't been updated in a given year, there is no ground to touch the file just to update the year.

For the maintenance burden many editors have a copyright update function. E.g. with emacs you can put:

(add-hook 'before-save-hook 'copyright-update)

in the ~/.emacs init file and have copyright-update be called automatically every time a file is saved.

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