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So I mentioned this earlier, but it bears repeating.

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You don't need to put a copyright notice on your website, on your app, on your photo, or anything else you make.

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The little copyright symbol and the year, all that, it's not required.

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What you make is copyrighted from the moment you make it.

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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.

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First of all, if you're going to add a copyright notice to your project,

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and why not, you don't need to do it on everything everywhere.

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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.

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Take it easy on the notices.

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Put one in the footer of your site.

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That might be on every page, but it's unobtrusive.

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Put it in the about section or in your terms of use.

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Put it in the credits of your app.

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Wherever you want to put it is fine.

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You just don't have to be constantly shouting the fact that your work is copyrighted. We know. We can see it.

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It's fixed in the tangible form. Right? At least you and I understand that now. Right?

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If somebody didn't, ignorance just isn't bliss in the world of copyright.

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A small, simple message somewhere out of the way is all you need.

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There is technically a proper way to do it.

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It doesn't need to be long, doesn't need to include a whole bunch of info or your address or anything like that.

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The Library of Congress just says to include the word copyright or that official copyright symbol,

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the year the work was copyrighted, and your name or your company name,

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the name of whoever owns that copyright.

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That's all you really need.

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But again if we don't have to give notice at all then what's the point?

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Do we actually need to include a year? Websites get updated all the time. What's the right year to include?

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When it comes to the web and mobile, there's really no good answer.

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Our current copyright laws predate the Internet to the point where you could register the copyright of your website,

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but you have to do it under the literary work category just like it was a book.

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It's not really built for things that change as often as the web does,

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but again that's okay because the notice isn't completely necessary.

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If you don't want to include a year, it's fine.

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A year demonstrates that you're keeping your site up to date maybe,

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and maybe it gives others a ballpark estimate of when your work will be falling into the public domain.

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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.

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So it's really up to you. There's no legal requirement to include a date or even to include notice at all.

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Really the most important part of a copyright notice isn't the date, and it isn't even that copyright symbol.

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It's you. It's your name, the name of the copyright owner.

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People will sometimes go searching for that.

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Who made this thing? Who do I need to contact to license it?

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Copyright notice is a quick way to discover that.

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Just don't get caught up and concerned that not having it everywhere is going to lead to someone stealing your stuff.

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It's not like that, and their ignorance just isn't your problem.

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A small, simple notice somewhere, if you want one, is all there is to it.