I feel that I already know the answer to this but I will ask it anyway as I would like the views of fellow writers. A prospective client asked me if I copyright my work, even though it would be posted on his site. While I can understand that this may be a concern to him (as he is paying me for it) I am not sure that it is my responsibility to copyright individual pieces or the responsibility of the site owner to copyright the site in general (if that makes sense). I am aware of Google Authorship, but this can only be used for my sites (as far as I am aware) and of course there is copyscape to check for plagiarism but this is after the fact and doesn't do much to protect against it in the first place. Any thoughts or suggestions on this? Thanks.
I suspect your client is worried that you will retain some or all of the copyrights for yourself. There are some writers who never convey the copyrights to their customers or charge extra for doing so. Personally, I've never seen the point in that unless the writer plans to resell the work - which, I can't imagine any serious client would agree to. I explain fairly early in the whole 'getting to know you' process that everything I do is classified as "work for hire" and upon full payment, the client gets full copyrights. I do mention that I might refer a future client to their site and ask if they have any issues with me doing so. Actually filing the work with the government should be the client's responsibility; unless you offer it as an add-on service.
My T&C's on my site state that copyright passes upon full payment, I do keep a copy of my work for a short time (on the laptop) but this is purely as a master copy. There is no way I would sell a copy of work already written, my morals wouldn't let me and it just doesn't make good business sense. The question he asked seemed to be more about protecting it once it was on his site. I haven't heard from him since I told him that this was something that I didn't do, which is a shame.