Don’t. The copyright year is not the current year. The copyright year is the year it was created / first published.<p>If you keep changing the year to the current year, you’re essentially lying about when it was created and artificially extending the duration of your copyright by one year per year.<p>If you put the wrong year, it renders the copyright notice invalid in the USA. This isn’t a big deal (creative works are copyrighted by default), but if you’re putting the notice there at all, presumably you care about it actually being legally valid.<p>Most people should just remove it. It doesn’t matter.
You don’t need to have any copyright symbols on anything for it to be protected:<p><a href="https://www.gov.uk/copyright" rel="nofollow">https://www.gov.uk/copyright</a>
The copyright should be applied (if at all) to individual pieces of content, and remain unchanged until/unless a new version is issued.<p>A copyright message on the site itself relates purely to the generic site filler and not the individual articles etc.
So, if I update the copyright...and some copycat sets their copyright say at 2019....who retains the copyright?<p>I mean semantically, I always figured copyright is the minute it's published the first time... kind of like 'established in 1979'.<p>However, if you are of the mindset that this should be done...then you should probably have it done automatically somehow...even on a static site generator it could probably be re-generated on a cron or something and automatically set that footer...even easier if using dynamic sites.