Don’t. The copyright year is not the current year. The copyright year is the year it was created / first published.

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.

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.

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:

https://www.gov.uk/copyright

If you didn't update the content of the page itself, surely updating the copyright year on every page is just a big fat lie?

Counterproposal: ditch at least the year. It’s obviously silly.

The copyright should be applied (if at all) to individual pieces of content, and remain unchanged until/unless a new version is issued.

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?

I mean semantically, I always figured copyright is the minute it's published the first time... kind of like 'established in 1979'.

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.

What is the true legal value of that date, or date range?

Just a reminder to license your website under a CC license.

People don't use JS for this?

do these footers actually carry any weight? regardless, thanks for the reminder--updated!