In a recent post at Problogger a guest post by Mark Patterson brought up some important legal issues for bloggers: Intellectual Property Law Tips for Bloggers.

I highly recommend all bloggers, even people just thinking about blogging, to read this post. I imagine some of it will be over your head (some of it went way over my head anyway!) and may not be relevant to you right now - but you may very well need it at some point in the future. You can always skim through it now, make a mental note of what's in it and bookmark it for sometime in the
future.

Copyright
One of the topics discussed in the post was copyright. Anything you create you own the copyright to, but you should really include a copyright notice on you blog also. Mark noted:

"Let's just say that if you ever had to take legal action against someone who blatantly copied your content, your failure to use a copyright notice will substantially devalue your case."

I know that I don't really display my copyright properly on my blogs - I should really be using my full name, but to keep a little bit of privacy, I usually just use my first name or a nickname. The copyright notice should include either the copyright symbol or the word 'copyright' and also include the year the content was first published or the range or years.

The code I use
I used to hand edit my year range to include the present year sometime around the first of each year. But it is easy to forget to change it, and I've seen many, many sites of others where they have apparently forgotten to update theirs too.

Rather than hand editing it each year you can use PHP code to display the current year. My copyright notice is written like this:

& copy; 2003 - < ?php echo date("Y") ?> ideasforwomen.com

The ampersand and the word 'copy' with the semicolon after it will give you the copyright symbol (©)- but and this is important - you need to get rid of the space between the ampersand and the word 'copy' - I had to put the space in here so you could see how I did it. The first year I had my site was in 2003, so that is listed first. Then the code within the php tags should give you the current year. And, like I mentioned above, you should really use your first and last name if at all possible, instead of your domain name like I do.

If you use this code on your blog, you don't ever have to worry again about changing the current year to January by hand!

How do you make use of it?
Within the WordPress theme you are using, find the footer file and at the bottom right before the closing body and html - place the code. And that's it! I hope it makes your like easier, as it has mine!