Meme transcription [Kid drowning in pool]
In the background a person plays with a kid in the pool. The person is labeled “Companies updating their website”. The kid is labeled “The company logo”.
In the foreground a kid seems to be drowning. It is labeled “Useful information”.
In a second panel a skeleton sits at the bottom of the pool. It is labeled “The copyright year”
When they don’t update it, im legally allowed to go into the inspect elements and copy all the code.
Tangentially related, I remember at one of my jobs being tasked (several years in a row) with updating the copyright year in all our source files’ headers.
it’s probably a red flag if your website can’t do currentYear() in the footer.
that’s actually an anti-pattern. the purpose if a copyright notice is not to declare the current year to each visitor, fyi.
Yes, it’s actually to notify people who aren’t part of countries with membership to the WTO of the first available year of public declaration of distribution without restriction, however, putting “1997” on your website makes it look old so people put current year to make it look new.
It’s only legally distinct in Aruba, Eritrea, Kiribati, Micronesia, North Korea etc… so it’s almost entirely useless.
I meant it’s a red flag if someone can’t spin up the code and is making an intern change it by hand every year.
I thought everyone does echo date("Y");
Well, everyone who’s coding their websites is, yeah. Seeing how almost 10% of all websites use Elementor now and are built by people without an understanding of coding concepts, there are probably plenty of websites that don’t output their copyright year dynamically.
No no, we do
time_t t = time(NULL);
struct tm tm = *localtime(&t);
tm.tm_year + 1900;
Everyone writes their web server in plain C, right?
The cool thing to do now is to write it in Rust, only using the standard library.
And I hate it. Nice concept, but I don’t like neither, the language nor compiler.
that’s where date('Y') comes in
At least in Europe the year after the copyright statement has no meaning, and even the copyright statement itself is useless. Since if not stated otherwise, no rights are granted by default.
