No longer under copyright?

Trionyx

Not an LE guru
Joined
Mar 16, 2018
Posts
1,398
“All contents © Copyright 1996-2024. Literotica is a registered trademark. Reproduction prohibited without written permission. Characters in all stories are over 18.”

Found at the bottom of the main page of this AH.
 
Copyright statements like this only need to be updated if something actually changes in the material they cover.

Since the forum software is stable and likely doesn’t need updating, and the forum layout hasn’t changed in ages, the footer may very well be left alone.
 
“All contents © Copyright 1996-2024. Literotica is a registered trademark. Reproduction prohibited without written permission. Characters in all stories are over 18.”

Found at the bottom of the main page of this AH.
You own the copyright on your stories, and have granted a licence to the site to publish. If this date means anything, it's the site's copyright on its content, not yours.
 
That doesn't mean anything. Somebody just forgot to update it.

Another point -- the date in the notice is not a termination date. It is the date of creation. So the range "1996-2024" is meant to indicate not the duration of the copyright but the range of dates during which copyrightable content was created. The rule for an individual is that the copyright term lasts for the life of the author plus 70 years. If the copyright is held by an entity like Literotica the term is 95 years after publication or 120 years after first creation, whichever expires first.

They've got a long time to go. Under modern rules they don't have to do anything to maintain it.

Since 1989, a copyright notice is not necessary to maintain copyright ownership. If someone forgets to update it, it has no effect.

Literotica only goes back to about 1998, so its copyright (in whatever it claims copyright in; I don't know what that is) will endure for a long time more, and the copyright term for new material begins to run only when the new material is created.

None of this applies to our stories; we own the copyrights in our stories.
 
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