> This way, you don't have to keep manually updating your web pages once a year.
Don’t do this. The copyright year is not there to show people the current year. What would the point of that be? Everybody knows what year it is.
The copyright year is to show you when the work was created. If you automatically set it to the current year, you are essentially lying to add more years onto the copyright term than you are supposed to get by law. Using the wrong year renders the copyright notice invalid in the USA. It’s still copyrighted, but the notice is worthless.
Also “All rights reserved” is legally meaningless everywhere. Every country that signed the treaty that gave it meaning has since signed a later treaty that superseded it.
I would also say there's barely any point adding the date at all anymore in most computing cases. In the very unlikely event that you need to prove the date in court you're probably going to be relying on archive.org and git logs anyway, and nobody is going to claim that it's over 75 years old or whatever.
Don’t do this. The copyright year is not there to show people the current year. What would the point of that be? Everybody knows what year it is.
The copyright year is to show you when the work was created. If you automatically set it to the current year, you are essentially lying to add more years onto the copyright term than you are supposed to get by law. Using the wrong year renders the copyright notice invalid in the USA. It’s still copyrighted, but the notice is worthless.
Also “All rights reserved” is legally meaningless everywhere. Every country that signed the treaty that gave it meaning has since signed a later treaty that superseded it.