[stylist] copyrighting your work

[Chris Kuell]

Hi Vejas,

In my opinion, you don't really need to copyright your work. The reason your 
teacher told you this is so that, if someone else publishes your work and 
says its theirs, you can prove you wrote it first. However, in a court of 
law, you can prove you wrote it first by the time/date stamp that 
accompanies everything you save on your computer. So what if your computer 
crashes? You could be in trouble then. However, computer whizes can retrieve 
almost anything from a computer, so if you really needed to prove it, I'm 
sure it could be done. And I'm not sure--does anyone know if when you save a 
document to a thumb drive, is it time/date stamped?

Now some people do take the time/energy/money to copyright their work, 
especially if it's a novel. I've heard others actually print and mail it to 
themselves, because the postal date stamp proves that they wrote it before 
it was mailed (it has to remain unopened), but this seems like a waste of 
time/energy/money to me.

chris