Is a piece of writing copyrighted automatically?
Anything that you write is your copyright, assuming that it is not copied from the work of someone else, as soon as you have written it on paper or recorded it on the disk of a computer or on tape, or broadcast it. It is not essential for the work to carry the © symbol, although its inclusion may act as a warning and help to stop another writer from plagiarising it. For other answers to FAQs on copyright, see the Copyright questions article by Michael Legat in the Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook.
