Copyright in Website Footers

November 17th, 2008 by Heather Maloney

In nearly every website we build for clients, we add a footer with Copyright client name and year in it. Recently I was asked to update the year in the footer to the current year for one such website, on the basis that they wanted to appear like the content is fresh. It’s a very interesting point that our client raised; the perception that the date next to the copyright indicates when the site was last updated.

As a compromise, and after a bit of discussion, we agreed that the footer should be changed to have the copyright year as the original year (as it may help to determine the year that the content / design was created for copyright purposes, and also perhaps deter someone thinking of stealing the content) and add another statement into the footer which reads “last updated Nov, 2008”.

What’s your thoughts on this? Do you read the date next to the copyright notice as indicating how fresh the content of a site is?

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmailby feather

Leave a Reply

Subscribe to our monthly

Contactpoint Email News

Our enews is sent out approximately monthly, and contains information on latest digital technologies, and how these can be used to help your organisation grow.

To subscribe, simply fill in your details below: