Drawar

I suppose to cover your butt and to be perfectly safe without any loopholes the first example works best. I'm not a lawyer, I just stayed a Holiday Inn.

It doesn't matter one way or another. From what I understand you are no more protected with than without, it is just a little extra to remind people.

"All text, software, audiovisual works, photographs, digital images and sounds are granted copyright protection as soon as they are created and fixed in tangible form."

Then you get into that " Fair Use" area which is still unclear to me as it seems up for interpretation although there has been litigation so their should already be precedents.

Copyrights Owned by Others.

This could all be wrong for all I know.

Unfortunately both are useless unless you can afford to fight a case in court. A lot of people come unstuck even with notices because small businesses especially can't afford to fight court cases.

It doesn't matter one way or another. From what I understand you are no more protected with than without, it is just a little extra to remind people.

That's my understanding too.

All copyright is implicit. You create a work and the copyright is automatically yours. Stating the copyright status just helps people find it out and offers you no more or less legal protection.

However, other people might not know this and see the lack of a © as copyleft, public domain, etc. They're wrong, so stating something about copyright (either of your examples) woulc cover these people.

Unfortunately both are useless unless you can afford to fight a case in court.

Depends where the infringing copy is. I've had dozens of pages and a few blogs/sites removed through the DMCA.

Thankfully, if you're willing to say (under written oath) that you're the owner, most service providers won't fight you.

Unless the offical rule has changed, the copyright is for the year where it was created, at least for printed documents

All of my work is officially copyrighted through the U.S. copyight office. I have paid the fees to have it all officially copyrighted.

Paying the fee to have your work officially copyrighted, gives you a certificate of copyright, which is an official document, and a legal one, and valid in a court of law. It states your name, the title of your work, the type of work, the year, the Library of Congress's catalogue number, etc., on it. It offers protection above and beyond a simple copyright icon and statement on a blog or website. The copyright holder is legally protected with this document.

An official copyright certificate validates the copyright holder. It is extremely useful, valid and viewed as such legally in a U.S. court of law.

Our law department @ Johnson and Johnson required that we place a copyright statement on all of our web content as well as trademark notifications.

i.e. © 1996 - 2008.
The dates represent the initial launch of the site to the current year.

I have seen some sites only place Trademark statements and NOT copyright statements. According to some legal advisers, a copyright statement is no longer needed as passed by legislation in 2006. I've been searching the copyright website to validate this but as of yet, I've had no luck finding anything in support of NOT using "© copyright".

• http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ66.html
• http://www.copyright.gov/legislation/dmca.pdf

Other links

• http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html
• http://www.eff.org/issues/dmca
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMCA