Generate copyright notice

Insert a claimed holder and relevant year into a selected notice or published licence template.

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ToolCopyright Notice Generator
Input
Output
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Put this on your own site

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Pick a dark background and the text and panels follow it, so the frame stays readable on a dark page.

Preview

How it works

The chosen literal template receives the year string and holder, producing a short notice, code comment, HTML paragraph, MIT text, Apache notice, or CC BY 4.0 statement. No ownership, publication history, or authority to grant the chosen licence is inferred.

  • The current year is an initial value for new work and must be replaced when another publication year or range is legally relevant.
  • The short notice is selected first because a notice and a permission-granting licence do different jobs.

Worked example

MIT license header for open-source project
Generate a full MIT license notice with custom holder and year range
Input
											Holder: Acme Labs
Year: 2023-2025
Format: mit
Output
												MIT License

Copyright (c) 2023-2025 Acme Labs

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUD…

When to use this

Website footers show notices, source files carry holder comments, and repositories include licence text selected by the rights owner.

Edge cases

  • MIT and CC BY 4.0 grant permissions rather than merely changing how © is displayed.
  • A year range is inserted verbatim and is not checked against revision or publication history.
  • Entering an employer, client, or contributor does not prove that party owns the rights or may license the work.

References