Do you have any legal basis for the value of the "1999, 2000, 2002-2005" form?

As far as I can tell this is all an elaborate ruse of made-up cargo-cult nonsense with no legal basis and no relevant case law. From what I can surmise:

• Explicit copyright notices may help prove willful infringement, but that's only relevant to seeking treble damages. I suspect the value of treble damages to copyright owners is probably not worth the engineering costs to maintain copyright headers in most cases. Also, no one seems to be offering this up as justification, even though it's the only actual legally-based justification I can identify. And this is very unlikely to be relevant in open source code (I presume damages are basically zero, so treble damages are also basically zero, and stopping the distribution rather than receiving damages would be the goal of any legal action), even if it might provide some partial justification for, e.g., Facebook's internal copyright headers.
• It seems like there is no legal basis in the US for "X, Y", "X-Y" or "X-Present" forms, and providing a too-early date may actually reduce the duration of the copyright. I can not find recommendations for these forms that are justified by any legal argument.
• Most copyright case law in the digital era seems to relate to piracy and the DMCA, not to software and/or open source. I can't find any case law related to copyright headers in open source software.
• Even the instructions associated with licenses seem inconsistent and not based in law. For example, the Apache 2.0 license has a different set of instructions (explicitly, no copyright year) for application in ASF projects vs application in general (explicitly yyyy copyright year).
• The ASF's justification for the header is that it allows third parties to recognize when individual files are permissibly licensed (this is also an argument in T2035), not that it provides any legal protection. It is hard for me to imagine that many projects gain more benefit from users who would not otherwise be able to figure out the license copying individual files into their own projects -- a scenario which I have literally never seen -- than they pay in engineering costs to deal with these headers -- especially not complex projects where all or nearly all source files are useless on their own. It seems like this goal could be accomplished just as well with a less complex rule anyway, e.g. "See NOTICE for license information."

Basically, I'd like actual legal justification for any rules we implement in the upstream. I've been unsuccessful in getting anything from real lawyers, and unable to find anything on my own, although I really have no idea how to search for case law effectively. In the absence of sound arguments for how these rules should work, I'm inclined to delete these linters: now that we no longer use these headers in the upstream, I'd rather not endorse any approach than try to implement a wildly diverse array of seemingly mythological incantations, covering multiple copyright years/owners/licenses and whatever else.