Great questions. Copyright confuses a lot of people – me too, at first, so I’ve done a lot of research. Any writing publicly shared is considered automatically copyrighted by the author. You don’t have to do a thing. Your work here (and anywhere else) is your property. To protect whatever you post here, I strongly suggest you always save your own copy – not only to prove it’s yours, but also in case something happens to the site. At this point, no one else can claim to be you because your posts come through with a unique IP address that no one else will have unless they use your computer.