The Copyright Notice

I mentioned above that you should place a copyright notice on your work. Up until 1989, it was required in the U.S. that you did so, but with the signing on to the Berne Convention this is no longer true. So we're still in the clear when it comes to our web sites. Still, just to put potential predators on their guard, it's a good idea.

The notice consists of three parts:

• the word or symbol for the copyright: that is, "Copyright" or "Copr." or the symbol ©. It's become something of a convention to use both the word and the symbol, thus: Copyright ©. Use one or both.

  A Gotcha: you may find that you can't easily enter the character © from your keyboard. In HTML, use the code

  ©

  (including the semicolon) to insert the copyright symbol on a web page. The letter C enclosed in parenthesis — (c) — isn't considered an acceptable substitute for the © symbol.

• the effective date. Usually that means the date that you first unleashed your site on the world — it's fine to put the year only. But when you modify parts of the and have to register the changed portions (I'll explain this further on) you may want to use more than one date: the original plus the date of the changed bits. (For instance, "2005-2007".)
• and your name. It has to be your real name or your well-known pen-name.

So: a typical notice looks like this:

Copyright © 2012 Llewellyn Llamalover.

Place it on your site's home page in an inconspicuous place. If perchance you're using copyrighted material from someone else, add the phase "except as acknowledged".

For this guide, our example web site is "Llewellyn's Llamasery". Llewellyn is a gentle Welshman who used to be known as just plain Lloyd Ffestiniog. But he developed such a passion for llamas that he changed his name, and when the World Wide Web came along, started up his site devoted to llamas. We can forgive him his poor taste in puns because he has a truly impressive site and because he's useful to us. Welsh is a difficult language, made no easier by the fact that to non-Welsh people the spelling has no relationship to the pronunciation. Thus, "ll" is pronounced "thl". A good deal of spluttering results if you try to pronounce the name of his site correctly!

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