one way I have decided to start protecting myself is to state copyright date (I live in the US so everything I create is automatically copyrighted...though not registered still copyrighted) you can use poor mans copyright if you don't have the money to buy a registration. Doing this you mail a copy of the poetry (original is best) to yourself, the mail gets dated by your postal service and therefore has a recognized date. This has held in some US court cases, mainly smaller ones. If you choose to register them, see if your country has a way to register them as volumes or collections. In the US you can register stuff as a collection and it is cheaper, you only need one registration fee. Also I have started using GPG, a version of PGP in my postings, if someone changes the text and the reader tries to verify the hash it will not verify. For more info go to google or the GNU website for GPG. If you do these things, then you are FAR less likely to have someone steal your material...I have done music for a while and seen peoples songs get stolen and while I knew who did it, and that the material wasn't theirs there was nothing I could do though it made me very angry to see someone commit such a crime. So please protect yourselves.
