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Copyright Basics

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How to Write a Copyright Notice

3:16 with Wilt Chaimberlain

Copyright notices might not be required by law, but they can be helpful for your users. There's also a proper way to write them, and some best practices for where to include them in your work.

Copyright notices used to be required in the United States for a copyright to be valid, but we did away with that in 1989. In fact, there are no countries anywhere in the world where a written copyright notice is required for the copyright to be valid. Good news since the web is "worldwide," right?

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    So I mentioned this earlier, but it bears repeating. 0:00
    You don't need to put a copyright notice on your website, on your app, on your photo, or anything else you make. 0:03
    The little copyright symbol and the year, all that, it's not required. 0:10
    What you make is copyrighted from the moment you make it. 0:14
    But there are some reasons that it's worth including a copyright notice on your work, and there's also a proper way to do it. 0:19
    First of all, if you're going to add a copyright notice to your project, 0:26
    and why not, you don't need to do it on everything everywhere. 0:30
    You don't need a copyright notice on every photo on your site or on every single page or at the end of every blog post. 0:34
    Take it easy on the notices. 0:41
    Put one in the footer of your site. 0:43
    That might be on every page, but it's unobtrusive. 0:45
    Put it in the about section or in your terms of use. 0:49
    Put it in the credits of your app. 0:52
    Wherever you want to put it is fine. 0:54
    You just don't have to be constantly shouting the fact that your work is copyrighted. We know. We can see it. 0:56
    It's fixed in the tangible form. Right? At least you and I understand that now. Right? 1:02
    If somebody didn't, ignorance just isn't bliss in the world of copyright. 1:07
    A small, simple message somewhere out of the way is all you need. 1:12
    There is technically a proper way to do it. 1:16
    It doesn't need to be long, doesn't need to include a whole bunch of info or your address or anything like that. 1:19
    The Library of Congress just says to include the word copyright or that official copyright symbol, 1:24
    the year the work was copyrighted, and your name or your company name, 1:30
    the name of whoever owns that copyright. 1:35
    That's all you really need. 1:38
    But again if we don't have to give notice at all then what's the point? 1:40
    Do we actually need to include a year? Websites get updated all the time. What's the right year to include? 1:45
    When it comes to the web and mobile, there's really no good answer. 1:51
    Our current copyright laws predate the Internet to the point where you could register the copyright of your website, 1:55
    but you have to do it under the literary work category just like it was a book. 2:01
    It's not really built for things that change as often as the web does, 2:06
    but again that's okay because the notice isn't completely necessary. 2:10
    If you don't want to include a year, it's fine. 2:14
    A year demonstrates that you're keeping your site up to date maybe, 2:18
    and maybe it gives others a ballpark estimate of when your work will be falling into the public domain. 2:20
    But the Internet is still so young that almost anything created for it isn't going to be public domain for longer than most of us will be alive. 2:26
    So it's really up to you. There's no legal requirement to include a date or even to include notice at all. 2:33
    Really the most important part of a copyright notice isn't the date, and it isn't even that copyright symbol. 2:42
    It's you. It's your name, the name of the copyright owner. 2:48
    People will sometimes go searching for that. 2:51
    Who made this thing? Who do I need to contact to license it? 2:54
    Copyright notice is a quick way to discover that. 2:57
    Just don't get caught up and concerned that not having it everywhere is going to lead to someone stealing your stuff. 3:00
    It's not like that, and their ignorance just isn't your problem. 3:06
    A small, simple notice somewhere, if you want one, is all there is to it. 3:11

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