Actually, you don't have to "copyright" something officially to make it "copyrighted"
See this site;
http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html
</font><blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana,Tahoma,Arial,Helvetica,Geneva">quote:</font><hr /><font size="2" face="Verdana,Tahoma,Arial,Helvetica,Geneva">In Summary
These days, almost all things are copyrighted the moment they are written, and no copyright notice is required.
Copyright is still violated whether you charged money or not, only damages are affected by that.
Postings to the net are not granted to the public domain, and don't grant you any permission to do further copying except perhaps the sort of copying the poster might have expected in the ordinary flow of the net.
Fair use is a complex doctrine meant to allow certain valuable social purposes. Ask yourself why you are republishing what you are posting and why you couldn't have just rewritten it in your own words.
Copyright is not lost because you don't defend it; that's a concept from trademark law. The ownership of names is also from trademark law, so don't say somebody has a name copyrighted.
Fan fiction and other work derived from copyrighted works is a copyright violation.
Copyright law is mostly civil law where the special rights of criminal defendants you hear so much about don't apply. Watch out, however, as new laws are moving copyright violation into the criminal realm.
Don't rationalize that you are helping the copyright holder; often it's not that hard to ask permission.
Posting E-mail is technically a violation, but revealing facts from E-mail you got isn't, and for almost all typical E-mail, nobody could wring any damages from you for posting it. The law doesn't do much to protect works with no commercial value. </font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="Verdana,Tahoma,Arial,Helvetica,Geneva">Fair use, means that you can use an illustration for teaching, criticism, etc., but this is a limited use. As an example: </font><blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana,Tahoma,Arial,Helvetica,Geneva">quote:</font><hr /><font size="2" face="Verdana,Tahoma,Arial,Helvetica,Geneva">This means that if you are doing things like comment on a copyrighted work, making fun of it, teaching about it or researching it, you can make some limited use of the work without permission. For example you can quote excerpts to show how poor the writing quality is. You can teach a course about T.S. Eliot and quote lines from his poems to the class to do so. Some people think fair use is a wholesale licence to copy if you don't charge or if you are in education, and it isn't. If you want to republish other stuff without permission and think you have a fair use defence, you should read the more detailed discussions of the subject you will find through the links above. </font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="Verdana,Tahoma,Arial,Helvetica,Geneva">