Copyright is the easiest, and for our money the best, of all rights to acquire. If your product is safeguarded by copyright protection then you should also be protected in many different countries under the Berne Convention and the Universal Copyright Convention. It's cheap, easy and immediate!

Here how you do it...

To firmly state ones rights, always use the copyright symbol '©', your name (or the name of whoever owns the copyright) and a date.

The date should be the year in which the work was first published. These should be included in or on your work.

They need not be very large or even in constant view, but they should be included AND VISIBLE (the actual word used, if you check, is 'perceptible').

The basic elements require by law for the notice are:

1. The copyright symbol: (c) or © or the word 'Copyright' or its abbreviation 'Copr.'
2. The year of first publication of the work e.g. 2007
3. The name of the copyright owner (yourself or your company etc.) or an abbreviation by which this name can be recognised
   

Put all of these elements together and you get the following options:

1. (c) 2007 YourBusiness or (c) 2007 YourName
2. © 2007 YourBusiness or © 2007 YourName
3. Copyright 2007 YourBusiness or Copyright 2007 YourName
4. Copr. 2007 YourBusiness or Copr. 2007 YourName

Please feel free to copy and use any of the above copyright notices for your own use (just insert your own name/business name where it says 'YourBusiness' or 'YourName' and date, obviously)!

The next best thing you can do is publish your work. This always makes it that much easier to prove that it is yours in the first place, although it is not (these days) strictly required to gain copyright protection.