Meme transcription [Kid drowning in pool]
In the background a person plays with a kid in the pool. The person is labeled “Companies updating their website”. The kid is labeled “The company logo”.
In the foreground a kid seems to be drowning. It is labeled “Useful information”.
In a second panel a skeleton sits at the bottom of the pool. It is labeled “The copyright year”
The one thing that consistently gets caught in code reviews in my shop is a failure to update a copyright date. I have been tempted to submit clearly crap code just to see if anyone actually is paying attention.
Unless you're renewing your copywrite every year, changing the date every year is wrong. You list the date it was copywrited, not the current year.
We add the current year to the copyright dates, the current updates are protected from the time of authorship. So if the copyright says, 2012, 2014, 2022; I would add a 2024. The commit records can be used to determine what was changed each instance, but the update provides notice of when changes were made.
Discerning what is protectable creative expression versus functional and therfore unprotected is an issue for the courts.