Copyright: How & Why

I was watching a video about the use of Partials for updating Copyright information on a website.

Why do you need to update this information?
Why do you even need to have a site copyrighted?
What benefit is conferred from copyright?

Simple, it’s protection for your content. Granted most sites created by RW are small and not likely to have some massive legal department monitoring the web for infringement but what you are saying with a copyright notice is that the content (text and images especially) belong to you or are licensed to you.

It can’t stop anyone taking images etc. from a website without permission, unless you’ve gone copy left/Creative Commons etc. and are happy for people to do so.

As to up easily updating the footer, there are two schools of thoughts: one which says you can exert copyright from an initial date, the other that you have to update the date to include the original year and the current year for copyright (some use scripts in RW to achieve this).

We’re looking at least two different interpretations of copyright protection. British copyright law (since 1710) has never relied on copyright notices or copyright deposit (although the latter is built into the copyright acts). The US, which until fairly recently has encouraged the stealing the rights of foreign copyright owners (think of Charles Dickens), makes a big thing of copyright notices. In any case, if someone is determined to steal your copyright material, they probably will

For the most part if you not going to pursue the expense of legal action yourself then copyright notice is really just a deterrent for people not to openly steal your work. Copyrights laws vary by country.

As for the copyright notice:

Use of the notice informs the public that a work is protected by copyright, identifies the copyright owner, and shows the year of first publication. Furthermore, in the event that a work is infringed, if the work carries a proper notice, the court will not give any weight to a defendant’s use of an innocent infringement defense—that is, to a claim that the defendant did not realize that the work was protected. An innocent infringement defense can result in a reduction in damages that the copyright owner would otherwise receive.

US law no longer requires the use of a copyright notice, although placing it on a work does confer certain benefits to the copyright holder. Prior law did, however, require a notice, and the use of a notice is still relevant to the copyright status of older works.

Thanks guys,

Here is another question: Where does the copyright point too?

By default RapidWeaver includes my personal name in the ©notice.
Does ownership have to be me or can it be attributed to my website?

If I create a variety of websites using the similar images/content could I have one master email address that creates an umbrella to copyright all the websites?

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