I want to make a site for my stories, poems etc. but my mom wants me to copyright them or something, could I just copyright the whole site or would I have to copyright every single poem/story, because that would cost a lot, I read that you can just use the symbol on your site and I did that on my current site, but I really don't want the text on the site I want to make to be taken...can anyone help or am I confusing?

Oh yeah, I live in the US

well, there's no guaranteed way of preventing anyone from just taking your stuff. i believe the way it works is that everything on the web is copyrighted by the person who put it there. you can add the copyright symbol yourself and say rather loudly "this is all mine! don't steal it!" i'm not sure of any way to actually copywrite it. i did hear that if you mail your stories, poems, etc to yourself and don't open them that constitutes a copyright (because of the date it was mailed and all that junk). sorry i couldn't be of much help.

Well you see, the problem with poems is that EVERYONE can take them, if they are text or image it doesn't matter.... it is just something everyone can write down. So yeah what i'm basically try to say is that you must dare to put them on the internet. If you are really addicted to these poems and you would never want to lose them ever then i would suggest to think about the idea again. You have a risk on the internet, everyone has. With the most advanced scripts you can't lock everything, there's always a way to get it. People just should get their hands off other people's work when it's not theirs. But yeah, the world is strange! but to answer your question:

more information about copyright is viewable here:

http://www.lissaexplains.com/stop.html

and you can find information about the copyright Office here:

http://lcweb.loc.gov/copyright/

Good luck, i hope this works and that you we can read your poetry soon! hehe :)

Love,
Mirna

Techincally, you don't have to do anything... it's copyright to you because it is your work --> http://www.whatiscopyright.org

However, we don't like in an ideal society :stickout:.

one suggestion that I've seen before if you don't want to pay the fee to have things officially copyrighted:

to prove that something is yours, print out a copy and mail it to yourself, but DON'T open it. if there should be any dispute, the postmark date will show when you had yours. although this probably wouldnt be of much use to you because i doubt that you'll be losing anything by someone stealing something, but it could be used say, if you had a business and someone copied your site and was using your content to get business or something, you could use the copies you mailed yourself as evidence of when you had your content.

OK, I'm not really worried about anyone taking my writing, it's just my parents know very little about the internet and they just are a little nervous about me putting up webpages at all.