RE: Copyright years

[dewar at gnat dot com]

<<now I'm seeing this I've a question that burns me already for years, and I
didn't yet find any answer for this.

Is there any legal issue behind the copyright years?

As I've seen the copyright year at almost every application ever seen.
like Copyright 1995-1999 babblebabble
>>

There is no legal issue here at all. The form of a copyright message on
the document itself has no legal significance in any case (the copyright
exists whether or not there is any notation in the document, and the term
of the copyright is statutory, and unaffected by anything that appears in
the document.

The form of a range (as in 1995-1999) is pretty standard, and used by both
IBM and Microsoft (whose lawyers presumably understand these issues). As
time goes by, the unnecessary insistance on a list of dates indeed becomes
burdensome, and I think the range is far preferable.

Note that the situation I state above in the first paragraph has not always
been the case, at least in the US. It used to be the case that a properly
stated copyright notice was important.

Robert Dewar

P.S. A consequence of this is that if you receive a document with no notice
on, you can *NOT* assume that it is public domain. Everything is copyrighted
automatically, and it is up to you to establish that something really is in
the public domain before assuming it is not. Indeed if you recive a document
that says it is in the public domain, then that's not decisive (the notice
might have been put there by other than the copyright holder).

I would definitely vote for allowing the range of dates to be used (that's
what GNAT uses by the way, and always has).