I have for years been trying to get the people here to stop mixing the words up and this blog has finally helped them see the light (that and having to point to pretty much every other site on the net that displays copyright messages)

However, I would like to add to the discussion (although a bit late) that there are some browsers that can’t display the copyright sign.

So as a rule I now put Copyright ©Year Owner to cover my behind.

Having looked further into this, there are those who suggest that you can’t put both but on the other hand I spoke to a lawyer who said as long as the format is correct you can have both the word AND the sign if appropriate.

Your advise is greatly appreciated!

For those of you who change the date, I’d recommend you pay close attention to Andrew Flusche’s comment (#5), “the important date for copyright purposes is when you first fixed the expression in a tangible format.” The copyright date should reflect the earliest date the material was created. It is not meant to show how current a site may be.

To show the latter, I’d add a line such as “This page last updated on “Sept. 7, 2009.” In this scenario it would be perfectly appropriate to use a script that publishes a date based on the last edit.