Are you more concerned with loss of profits from your work, lack of attribution when someone takes it and reuses it, academic dishonesty, lack of control or what else have I forgotten? I think every creator has the right to determine what level of locked-upedness they want to apply to their works, I respect copyrighted works online (although, look at my avatar--just not too closely publishers of Tootles the Train!), but for anything I am likely to compose or write I expect I'll just put it out there, take any publicity it generates, and let the files find their own levels and uses. Of course, I'm not making a living from recordings or writing nor am I likely to do so. Philosophically I'm on the side of the mashers-up who recombine bits and fragments, be they images or sounds or words, into new works.

Your question about publishability of previous web-published works is interesting, but needs a legal mind to offer an informed opinion.

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}- Mark -{ ASPARAGUS Asparagus in a lean in a lean to hot. This makes it art and it is wet wet weather wet weather wet. —Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons

I tend to disseminate my own works among friends, and that is about where it ends. There are a few sites I post things on publicly, but the majority of those pieces are fan works, using an existing work as a foundation for my own project.

For academic dishonesty, there are a lot of teachers that google search snippets from essays and poems nowadays. There were a few students in one of my high school classes that thought they could get away with it, but they were wrong.

To my knowledge, there are quite a few people who have used some of my older pieces in their own projects. The ones that I'm aware of have always contacted me and asked for permission (under the condition that they give me credit for my own work), which I have always granted. I am not particularly skilled at any of my hobbies at the moment, though, so I tend to not have hopes for making money off of any of my current projects. With that said, I appreciate spreading creativity around, and if a piece of work that I have made public inspires someone and they want to use it as a basis for something of their own, I am almost always willing to help them out.

For purely original pieces of work, posting them on large, public sites with good copyright and content protocols tends to be the way to go. For creative writing, though, it may be nearly impossible to prove if the work is actually yours. For music and graphical art projects, having the original project file you worked in is almost always proof enough that you created it, especially if someone else claiming such a thing cannot produce a similar project file.

Okay, am bumping this one again. A friend of mine, whom I believe is in the industry and has actually been published (whether book or magazine, I can't quite recall), mentioned so long as it was a small and locked forum, it was quite safe to post original works online and still retain future first publishing rights.

Now, another friend said this a VERY hazy area and posting original works online, even locked down to ONLY YOURSELF, constitutes self-publishing and negates first-rights worldwide (as the internet is international). Yet somehow, email squeaks by this, which I find mindboggling. To me, email is almost worse than posting in a locked forum as then the recipients have an actual FILE with your info in it. And I fail to see how any of this is ANY different than giving someone a hard copy to read because you never know what they may do with it!

Does anyone actually know? Online searches are highly misleading and I swear, it doesn't seem ANYONE knows. Short of asking each and every publishing company, what seems to be the best of way of getting the very much needed feedback to an original work without putting first-publishing rights into question and getting shafted by any potential publishing later on, assuming the work itself is publish-worthy?

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A closed mind is like a closed book - nothing can be gained if either remains closed.

I have studied copyright a little as being a musician, legal studies student and writer it is very much in my interests to know what rights you have to intellectual property. For a start as you are American, (I checked it changes from country to country), your copyright is instantaneous, from the minute you create something that is considered "intellectual property" it is protected by the the United States copyright laws. No application needed, because of that anything you post online is yours and cannot be published, copied or used without your express permission and if you wished to you could charge them for that use. If someone does copy your work that constitutes a crime and you can sue, regardless of what country they live in. I can almost guarantee that you will never come into contact with a person who wants to use your works in a country where your copyright isn't applicable. I can't even name one.

If you wanted to prove work is yours - presuming it's online - then all you would need is the date you posted it online. If they copied your work then they pretended it was theirs after that date. If there is something you really want to be sure of then there are registers and such for that sort of thing but I'm Australian and any register I would use wouldn't be something available to you.

Hope that helps and sets your mind at ease somewhat although if a student tries to use your work a legal battle might be a little extreme.