If the book I recently bought was printed in 2000, how come the copyright year is 2001? And if the copyright year is not until next year, can other writers legally quote from the book without seeking permission or acknowledging the source?
The publisher intended the book to come out in 2001 and that was the date printed in the book.
The discrepancy in the year probably won’t make any difference until all of us are long dead anyway.
And no, you can’t rip off parts of the book and reprint them because of the question regarding the date. Once the item is put into print, copyright laws apply.
Go figure, I actually found some real information on why this is no big deal.
According to the Library of Congress Circular 3 on Copyright Notice, errors in year that are later than the real date are to be treated under the rules for “Omission of Notice” (while if you use an incorrectly early date it just changes the expiration date). The “Omission of Notice” section says:
[quote]
“Omission of notice” is publishing without a notice. In addition, some errors are considered the same as omission of notice. These are:
[ul][li]A notice that does not contain the symbol © (the letter C in a circle), or the word “Copyright”[/li][li]A notice dated more than 1 year later than the date of first publication[/ul][/li][/quote]
So it looks like your notice, which was dated only 1 year later than first publication, doesn’t count as anything bad. So no loophole. 
As the author of a number of books, I’ve noticed that most which appear in the fall have “next year” copyrights. I asked one editor about this; she didn’t know. I asked another; she likened it to cars and model years. Why do '01 models come out in summer '00? To fool people into thinking they’re ‘fresher’ than they really are. The same applies to books–since most of them have an awfully short half-life, every little bit you can do to get people thinking they’re reading something up-to-the-minute is good.