Compliance Web

A Copyright Line As Feeding For Your Footer

Being fed by oranges

In the Euro­pean legal area, exploita­tion rights inher­ent­ly belong to the author of a work. She does not have to do any­thing else. In the Amer­i­can legal area, things are dif­fer­ent. There, every work falls into the ‘pub­lic domain’ by default. Only when the author active­ly claims her ‘copy­right’, the work belongs to her. Thus, hav­ing in copy­right line in your foot­er could be help­ful for you:

But what hap­pens with orig­i­nal Euro­pean works in the Amer­i­can legal area? With­out claim­ing author­ship, they prob­a­bly fall into the pub­lic domain. So an author is well advised to mark her Euro­pean pub­li­ca­tions with a copy­right notice, even if this seems super­flu­ous from the Euro­pean view­point.1 And so she should keep it with her Inter­net sites.

[ en | de ]

Solution

  • Add the fol­low­ing line to the file scss/_bscore_custom.scss of your child theme:
.bootscore-copyright {display: none;}
  • Add a text box to the new wid­get Foot­er Info aris­ing under Appearance/Widgets.
  • Enter a text line start­ing with ‘©’ YEAR Author-Name’.

Background

Update Plate
Until ver­sion bootScore 5.2.3.3, we had to cre­ate a wid­get for the copy­right line our­selves and acti­vate it in the footer.php file. With ver­sion 5.2.3.4, the bootScore authors have thank­ful­ly tak­en this idea of an editable CR-Line and pro­vid­ed the wid­get ‘Foot­er Info’ for it. In this sense, I have updat­ed the solu­tion and back­ground infor­ma­tion.

So, even­tu­al­ly, there is the ques­tion of loca­tion and copy­right sign in the line. In this case, the form is rather sec­ondary: you are not oblig­ed to use the HTML tag $copy; for ©. You can also use images like or — very old-fash­ioned — the string (C). You also do not need to add a town or a coun­try. In case of dis­pute, you only have to prove that You are You. That’s why I often add my place of res­i­dence and my nation. Does that work? No idea. I’m not a lawyer and I don’t give advice; I just tell. And I have nev­er been involved in a dis­pute.


And how does this …

… sup­port our migra­tion to bootScore? Well, if a web design­er must aban­don her cur­rent Word­Press theme, she needs a replace­ment. A free ‘off-the-shelf’ theme, she prob­a­bly wants to per­son­al­ize. First a bit cos­met­i­cal­ly, then in terms of the gray val­ue of her pages, mul­ti­lin­gual­ism and inter­nal ref­er­ence tech­niques and link­ing. Final­ly, she per­haps enables spe­cial foot­ers, a sec­ondary menu or a copy­right notice before check­ing the SEO fea­tures of the select­ed theme. This is a way that this post sup­ports too.


  1. There­fore the FSF says that the free GNU soft­ware is first put under copy­right and then becomes copy­left soft­ware by means of the GPL. []
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