Updating Your Blog Footer Copyright Notice: Why and How

Most blogs have it – you know, the letter “c” with a circle on it – of the blogs’ footer section. We have it, too – “Copyright © 2009-2011 The Friendly Blogger. All Rights Reserved.” If you neglect the copyright notice, I recommend you to add it into your blog’s footer, for some reasons.

Well, you know these days – people steal other people’s blog content shamelessly. I heard people tell others that once their content is published, it’s in public domain so everybody can copy it… no sirrreeee!

Yes, everybody can copy it – but not everybody is allowed to do so; there’s copyright issue involved. People who copy your blog content “without knowing the implications” need to be noticed and reminded about the copyright, in such a way that when there’s a plagiarism issue, you can stake your claims using the copyright notice.

One of the thing bloggers seem to underestimate is their blogs’ footer copyright notice. Many bloggers also neglect it in such a way that it’s not even updated for years!

Not only blogs, big news sites also forget to update the copyright notice… one example: Not trying to make fun over others’ mistake, but check this International Data Group Norway’s News section I recently visit: Scroll down and you will see the copyright notice is “stamped” with the year of 2009 (the main site has 2011 copyright notice.)

The bottom line: You need to update your blog’s footer copyright notice on yearly basis.

How?

Some people do it manually – every year. When you run a blog, this is not a real hassle, but what if you run dozens of blogs?

Nevertheless, you can actually automate this. Design Shack UK has a short but sweet post about the footer copyright notice – the article advises for us to use PHP (WordPress is built using PHP, by the way…) or Javascript…

PHP:

<?php echo date(“Y”); >

JavaScript:

<script type=”text/javascript”>
var d = new Date()
document.write(d.getFullYear())
</script>

If you use WordPress like The Friendly Blogger, here’s how to do it:

1. Open your footer.php file

2. Add the following in the desired location:

<p>Copyright © 2009 – <?php echo date(‘Y’); ?> YourBlogName.com</p>

3. That’s it!

So there you go – hopefully this can help you thwart away plagiarists… good luck!