Generally a author has copyright over their works without having to explicitly says so. Saying "Copyright (c) YYYY AUTHOR NAME" is just a way of asserting it to remove potential confusion or ambiguity.
With no licensing, there is no right to use a copyright work (except fair use). BSD licensing a work is granting permission is a set of circumstances, not revoking permission. Thus if a license is not correctly applied the work cannot be used, rather than the inverse.
As for "The content in this repo is BSD licensed" - the usual licensing wording is again a convention designed to be as clear as possible, but the wording applied there probably counts as it pretty clearly intends to give permission. The "probably" is why people ought to stick to known and understood conventions.
The license part of the README.md says "The content in this repo is BSD licensed".
AFAIK licensing requires:
- A copyright line with the year (or years) and the name of the copyright holder.
- IIRC a way to contact the copyright holder is required (email, URL, etc), but I may be wrong and it's just optional.
- A copy of the license grant/notice is required, ie. the "boilerplate notice" form Apache license that includes a link to the full license text.
In this case, does the "The content in this repo is BSD licensed" sentence have any kind of effect?
EDIT: ate a word, formatting