CompuServe Messages

Very generally speaking, Sanford, my lawyer tells me that, whether you include a Copyright statement/date or not, if you can prove YOU originally published/created/distributed/etc. a certain piece of text, music, art or what have you, you reserve the Right to Subsequent Copies, or, it's Copyright. Certainly, the more documentation that exists with said pieces concerning it's origin (Copyright statements, federal forms, your picture on the cover<g>, etc) the easier it's gonna be to prove this, and (perhaps) the more unlikely someone will try to steal it's use. This (I believe) is why CIS lists it's rules concerning copyrights so stringently. We had a copyright-expert lawyer help us with a band name problem once. We had to prove we used it as a band name in public first, generally speaking, which gave us the right to keep using it.