i believe it is the content you are copyrighting, not the site or domain.

Good point. But since many of us do not copyright the images and videos for our published content and use that symbol on our footer regardless, I was wondering which I should use. Which looks better...

We use the 2000-2009 for the same reason, so show how long the site has been around. Gives us some street cred... ;-)

so Maximillianos, if you were to use another domain on the same website in lets say year 2005 would you still write 2000-2009 and use the old domain/brand or write 2005-2009 with the new brand/domain ?

I'm with maximillianos

We use an .inc.php that uses a variable $startyear that notes when the site opened for business and a variable $currentyear = date (Y); that automatically updates the footers.

"use another domain on the same website"
I don't quite understand this, but each domain gets a $startyear of when we took it live. We don't look for ways to 'pad' extra years. If it is a new site, we are hungry. If is an old site, we are established. LOL

dailypress - I consider the copyright mark towards my company's ownership of the content, irrelevant of the age of the domain.

So if you switch to a new domain (2009 registered), but it is the same company, same content, etc as the old 2005 domain, then I would keep the same copyright dates of 2005-2009.

You are not claiming a copyright to the URL, you are claiming a copyright to the content. Though in some cases you may have copy rights on the URL. But in general folks want to protect their content.

Note: I am not a lawyer. This is just my opinion.

using a variable for the footer is interesting. I never thought about that.

MaxiM: thanks for the info. So what I finally did was:

Example2.com (C) 2005-2009 Company, .... it looks much better now.

Now back to worrying about more important things, like going to bed to attend an early meeting. ;)