Copyright notices aren't there to tell you what the current year is. What would the point of that be? Everybody knows what the current year is.
Copyright notices are there to declare when a creative work was created. That's when the copyright term starts. If you just set it to the current year you're lying about when the copyright expires and it renders the notice invalid (at least in the USA).
In this case, you can see from the Wayback Machine that this was, in fact, created in 2016 [0]. So that copyright notice is correct, and you're implying it should be changed to be incorrect.
There's already tonnes of bad advice out there telling people that copyright notices should always display the current year. Please don't spread this idea.
Thanks Jim for highlighting this and teaching about a common misconception. My intent was to help the author avoid the “dead website” feel of a 2-3 year old (c) label. Updating the year to current year could be one solution but I was not proposing anything.
I hear your point on the legality angle and have done a ton of reading to update my own stance on this.
What happens when the created work is edited? Is there some threshold of trivial edits below which you can't change the year in the notice?
I mean presumably if you do edit it, people still have the right to use older versions when the copyright expires. But how does that play with the requirement to give notice?
Your statement makes a ton of sense. Assuming you’re correct, it is a bit crazy how many sites have the copyright programmatically set to the current year.
Copyright notices are there to declare when a creative work was created. That's when the copyright term starts. If you just set it to the current year you're lying about when the copyright expires and it renders the notice invalid (at least in the USA).
In this case, you can see from the Wayback Machine that this was, in fact, created in 2016 [0]. So that copyright notice is correct, and you're implying it should be changed to be incorrect.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20161128194614/http://www.black....
There's already tonnes of bad advice out there telling people that copyright notices should always display the current year. Please don't spread this idea.