Licenses

How to write a Copyright Notice

There are four important elements that all copyright notices need:

1. © sign or something similar
2. year of creation
3. author
4. rights statement

© sign

This is exactly what you expected it to be:

• © (© in HTML)
• (c)
• “Copyright”
• or a combination of the above

Example:

Copyright (c)

Year of publication

In projects that aren’t published in just one year (blogs, software etc.) you need to specify the first and last year.
For software that means the release year of the first and last version.
For blogs the year when the first post was made and the release year of the last post.

Examples:

One year (Photos etc.): 2018
Multiple years (Blogs, Apps etc.): 2005-2018

Author

• your full name
• pseudonym
• website
• or a combination of the above

Examples:

John Smith
johnsmith.com
John Smith, johnsmith.com

Rights statement

• “All rights reserved.”: Everyone needs permission from you
• “Some rights reserved.”: There’s a license
• “No Rights Reserved.”: Public domain (also consider using The Unlicense, CC 0)

Putting it together

You can:

• put a comma between name and year
• a dot at the end

Examples:

Copyright (c) 2018 Ma124 All rights reserved.
Copyright 2018 Ma124, ma124.github.io
© 2003-2018 John Smith Some rights reserved
(c) 2018, ma124.github.io

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