Happy New Year (yes, already)



  •  It's that time of year again! Our customer services team are "diarising" (is that even a word?!) customer accounts that need contacting when we re-open over to January 2010, but forgetting to change the year field on our calendar control and setting the date to Jan 2009. But that's not the WTF....

     This year, someone actually bothered to mention it to me so I could fix it (it's only been a bug for around 10 years). No bother, just something to do as I'm getting bored (it's not worth doing any "real" work on Xmas Eve!). The original code in the section that presumably should have done this check looked like this:

     

    <font size="2" face="courier new,courier">Calendar.Show</font><font size="2" face="courier new,courier">
    If Calendar.SelectedDate >= Date Then
        HoldDate = Calendar.SelectedDate
    Else
        HoldDate = Calendar.SelectedDate   
    End If</font>

    Ah, the joys of the impending new year!



  •  One of the websites I maintain shows the year at the bottom of every page as part of the copyright notice. All in all there about 10 different (js) footer files and each page in the site uses one of them. In every one the html is generated by javascript. In every one of them the date was hardcoded because getting javascript to show the current year is clearly too cutting edge for the original developer to know.

    This was so retarded apparently that is seems to have killed off some of my brain cells, because I distinctly remember thinking for a moment "Crap, this isn't PHP, I can't set the date dynamically". Anyway it's fixed now.


  • Garbage Person

    @DOA said:

    One of the websites I maintain shows the year at the bottom of every page as part of the copyright notice.
    THATS NOT HOW COPYRIGHT WORKS. Copyright only refreshes with new content, not on every pageserve.If you haven't touched a page since 1997, it should still say 1997 regardless of what year it is when the page loads.

     

    Then again, this is the Internet. Nobody seems to understand copyright properly.

     

    AND NO CHANGING THE YEAR IN THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE IS NOT NEW CONTENT.



  • @Weng said:

    THATS NOT HOW COPYRIGHT WORKS. Copyright only refreshes with new content, not on every pageserve.If you haven't touched a page since 1997, it should still say 1997 regardless of what year it is when the page loads.
    Alright, keep your panties on. Content in that website changes almost daily. Now I'm sure there are some pages that haven't changed in a while, but I'm not crazy enough to tie the copyright notice to the site update. This is still moot however, because the client asked for it to change every year and I'm not gonna argue over trivialities like this.



  • @Weng said:

    @DOA said:

    One of the websites I maintain shows the year at the bottom of every page as part of the copyright notice.
    THATS NOT HOW COPYRIGHT WORKS. Copyright only refreshes with new content, not on every pageserve.If you haven't touched a page since 1997, it should still say 1997 regardless of what year it is when the page loads.

     

    Then again, this is the Internet. Nobody seems to understand copyright properly.

     

    AND NO CHANGING THE YEAR IN THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE IS NOT NEW CONTENT.

    Meh, he's far from the only person to do that... Anybody run Apple Rhapsody (early development of what became Mac OS X, basically OpenSTEP with a Mac OS 9 "theme"), recently?


  • Garbage Person

    @mallard said:

    Meh, he's far from the only person to do that.
    This changes nothing about how incorrect it is.

    I'm of the opinion that if you willingly post incorrect copyright notices, your copyright should be null and void.



  • I don't understand why anyone bothers with the copyright notices and years.  Given the current copyright term, when the copyright of the content expires, none of us will be alive and computers anywhere near resembling the current ones will only be found in museums.  Whether the copyright year is 2009 or 2010 or e.g., 1990, makes no difference.



  • @Weng said:

    @mallard said:

    Meh, he's far from the only person to do that.
    This changes nothing about how incorrect it is.

    I'm of the opinion that if you willingly post incorrect copyright notices, your copyright should be null and void.

     

    It's not null and void, it's optional. Copyright on creative works is automatic, however when you explicitely add the copyright notice you will have a stronger case in court because the infringer can not claim that he thought it was free to use. It will make the difference between innocent infringement and infringement. So please do remove the stick that was up your rectum and stop assuming people are stupid simply because you read somewhere that it wasn't necissary. 



  • @Weng said:

    AND NO CHANGING THE YEAR IN THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE IS NOT NEW CONTENT.


    Aww. You're no fun.



  • @DOA said:

    This was so retarded apparently that is seems to have killed off some of my brain cells, because I distinctly remember thinking for a moment "Crap, this isn't PHP, I can't set the date dynamically". Anyway it's fixed now.
     

    Loss of brain cells as the result of too many festive season office drinks?

    Our CMS used to wtf up the footers every time it was upgraded, because it's a php template based thing with its own tags for generating date etc. and would set all the 'last updated' dates to the date it was patched.



  • @DOA said:

    @Weng said:

    THATS NOT HOW COPYRIGHT WORKS. Copyright only refreshes with new content, not on every pageserve.If you haven't touched a page since 1997, it should still say 1997 regardless of what year it is when the page loads.
    Alright, keep your panties on. Content in that website changes almost daily. Now I'm sure there are some pages that haven't changed in a while, but I'm not crazy enough to tie the copyright notice to the site update.

    It's pretty easy to have PHP, mod_perl, mod_ruby, or pretty much any other server-side language set the copyright date based on the file modtime.  It's not even all that difficult in mod_perl (haven't checked with the others, but I suspect it's true there also) to have the copyright date be based on the file modtime of the requested file, rather than the include file that's producing the date.

    @DOA said:

    This is still moot however, because the client asked for it to change every year and I'm not gonna argue over trivialities like this.

    Agreed, this isn't enough to get worked up over.  I would mention it to the customer, but I'd do it with a clear predisclaimer that they were the customer and I was happy to do it their way, I just wanted to ensure that they were informed about what the right way was.  Having clearly communicated that, and the fact that using JavaScript to produce the date would mean that anyone browsing the site with JavaScript disabled, or making liberal use of a mod to only allow specific JavaScripts to run, would not see the copyright date at all, I'd not pursue it any further.



  • @Weng said:

    Copyright only refreshes with new content, not on every pageserve.If you haven't touched a page since 1997, it should still say 1997 regardless of what year it is when the page loads.
    The copyright notice would cover the entire publication. The problem is: what constitudes a "publication" in terms of a web site? Just the page? The entire site? A subdomain? And I elide all the scenarios re: ownership of copyright and license to publish and so forth as being unnecessary - especially since I don't know how the site operates wrt those issues in this instance.Suffice to say: it's easy to have situations where even new content wouldn't refresh the copyright either.



  • @DOA said:

    Content in that website changes almost daily. Now I'm sure there are some pages that haven't changed in a while, but I'm not crazy enough to tie the copyright notice to the site update.
    Seems to me like that'd be a trivial operation. Each update should have a date attached to it, so when polling the DB for the updates just collect the dates and output the latest one on the footer.



  • The simple answer to all this pointless bollocks is just to not have the date in the copyright notice in the footer at all. Problem solved.


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