I actually made up that name - I know little to nothing except what I overhear in the dining hall from pre-law students about copyright law (and let me tell you, that's still not much). In any case, I think I have a slightly different problem from many forum visitors which is that I use 100% my own graphics, I have completely unique content and I use my own wordpress templates. Do I have any claim to that content and art if I haven't legally copyrighted it? I was fairly certain I read something somewhere (vague, I know) that if you can prove you were posting and using the content prior to the person copying it, you can still take legal action against them. Is this true? If not, where should I take my work to be copyrighted? I don't have any problems yet but I wanted to head off any potential problems.
Visiting this website can help you go through the copyright acknowledgment process: http://creativecommons.org/license/
That's a license agreement. Copyright means the right to own a worth of authorship. Wikipedia has a good explanation of what common law means in this respect. Common law copyright is the legal doctrine which contends that copyright is a natural right and creators are therefore entitled to the same protections anyone would be in regard to tangible and real property. It means that people can own rights to a book they write the same way they can own a house or a car.