> The copyright notice on a work establishes a claim to copyright. The date on the notice establishes how far back the claim is made. This means if you update the date, you are no longer claiming the copyright for the original date and that means if somebody has copied the work in the meantime and they claim its theirs on the ground that their publishing the copy was before your claim, then it will be difficult to establish who is the originator of the work.
Google something like "Banana bread recipe." Notice how all the results have dates. People are more likely to click on results from 2023 because this is often a good indicator that it's what they are looking for.
>Every January 1st, an army of open source developers rushes out to update their copyright attributions in licenses and documentation. Why? Because we’ve always done it that way.
>I’ve stopped participating after I learned that copyright statements need only the year of the first publication and no lawyer that I asked contradicted
>Now, I’m not a lawyer, so don’t take this as legal advice from me. All I’m saying is that if it’s good enough for Google’s, Microsoft’s, and Netflix’s lawyers, it’s good enough for me
If I land on a random web app and it says Copyright 2021 I am going to assume it's not being actively developed, and may not have been touched since 2021.
> The copyright notice on a work establishes a claim to copyright. The date on the notice establishes how far back the claim is made. This means if you update the date, you are no longer claiming the copyright for the original date and that means if somebody has copied the work in the meantime and they claim its theirs on the ground that their publishing the copy was before your claim, then it will be difficult to establish who is the originator of the work.
https://stackoverflow.com/a/2391555