Things aren't as cut and dry with legal traditions. I'm sure there are tons of scraps of legal language that remain in use only because it's traditional and few people know any better. Like some kind of legal shibboleth.
Like coderdude said above[1], whenever you see "All Rights Reserved"[2] you're seeing it in action.
It appears that you're correct, but I'm still having a hard time believing that the legal departments of almost every major company make the same mistake. That makes me think that there is something we're missing.
IANAL but for web pages, especialy dynamic ones, "the year of first publication" seems to be a flawed concept. You could as well say the page is first published everyday.
About the presence of rogue engineers playing with copyright notices at will in big companies, some yahoo properties go through the hassle of manually updating the copyright notice every year under the explicit request from the legal department.
And when the legal department noticed the error they didn't want to go through all the hoops to get it fixed, as legally it has no meaning. Also, as we see many people seem to think that you need to update the year, so they might have done it on purpose even.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_notice