In a nutshell, what this does is display a copyright message for your site with an automatically-updating "to" year and will also show only the starting year if both years are the same (so you don't end up with something like "2013 - 2013"). This method, as far as I know, requires that you have IP.Content installed.
[*]Go to
Admin CP > Other Apps > Content > Blocks.
[*]Click Add Block.
[*]Select Raw PHP for the type. Proceed to the next section.
[*]Name the block Dynamic Copyright, place under URLs & Variables, tick the Cache this block box, and set the block's cache lifetime to 1440 minutes (every 24 hours). Proceed to the next section.
[*]Copy and paste the following code in. Make sure to replace STARTING DATE with a valid four-digit year, URL with a valid URL of your choice, and TITLE with the text that you want to act as the link. $startyear = STARTING DATE;$endyear = date("Y");echo "© ";if ($startyear == $endyear) { echo "$startyear ";}else { echo "$startyear - $endyear ";}echo " <a href='URL'>TITLE</a>";[*]Once you've saved the block, head over to Admin CP > Look & Feel > Manage Skin Sets & Templates > Manage Templates in {site name}.
[*]Load up globalTemplate.
[*]Press Ctrl + F and search for {$footer_items['copyright']}.
[*]Create a new line directly above that one and paste <p style='text-align: right;'>{parse block="dynamic_copyright"}</p> into it.
[*]Head to your forum index and press F5 to confirm that it shows up as intended. I'm sure there's a simpler method, but I'm lazy and happen to know some PHP, so... although if you know of a more elegant solution feel free to post it here.
Hope this helps.
Edit: Added images. Also, is relevant (replace the first line after <p class="copyright"> with {parse block="dynamic_copyright"}.