With the recent plagiarism scandal here, the notes are filling up with concerns about copyright protection. While I am not a lawyer, I am a working writer who has had to deal with this issue for many years; I thought it might be helpful to make a few points.
Copyright protection in the US is automatic when the work is created in "fixed" form. No filings are required.
It is not necessary to publish a work in order to obtain copyright protection. If a manuscript sits in your desk drawer, the copyright is still yours.
Works published in the US are automatically afforded US copyright protections. I suspect, though I haven't researched this, that a posting on a US-based website (such as Chess.com) counts for this purpose.
A copyright notice (incorporating the (c) symbol and a date) is unnecessary. However, this is a relatively new development (from the early 1990s) and it hasn't settled into writers' collective consciousness yet.
That said, having a (c) copyright notice on your work can help you in court, since a plagiarist can't claim that he had no knowledge there was a copyright in place.
Copyright protection currently endures for the author's life plus 70 years.
A copyright, which legally is a form of property, can be transferred (for example, if you sell an article to a magazine); but in general, this requires an agreement in writing.
There is a great page at http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ1.html which I urge all writers to read. And also be sure to keep your ear to the ground, because some issues are still somewhat fluid.
For example, there was a major (from my perspective) Supreme Court case (New York Times Company v. Tasini, 2001) where a group of freelancers won a judgment against the NY Times for posting their works online without compensation. The Times argued that the original copyright transfer entitled them to republish the works however they wanted; the Court held that the original authors had not given up certain aspects of their copyrights. For me, this resulted in a lot of clients contacting me and giving me more money for work I'd done long ago. It was like freakin' Christmas.
Anyway, don't freak out about copyrights too much...but then again, it can never hurt to protect the things that are important to you.
With the recent plagiarism scandal here, the notes are filling up with concerns about copyright protection. While I am not a lawyer, I am a working writer who has had to deal with this issue for many years; I thought it might be helpful to make a few points.
There is a great page at http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ1.html which I urge all writers to read. And also be sure to keep your ear to the ground, because some issues are still somewhat fluid.
For example, there was a major (from my perspective) Supreme Court case (New York Times Company v. Tasini, 2001) where a group of freelancers won a judgment against the NY Times for posting their works online without compensation. The Times argued that the original copyright transfer entitled them to republish the works however they wanted; the Court held that the original authors had not given up certain aspects of their copyrights. For me, this resulted in a lot of clients contacting me and giving me more money for work I'd done long ago. It was like freakin' Christmas.
Anyway, don't freak out about copyrights too much...but then again, it can never hurt to protect the things that are important to you.