I'm creating a website for my school newspaper, on the schoool's server. I'll be posting article archives there and such, and just had a question on copyright. Do I have to put one of those copyright disclaimers at the bottom, like the Copyright (C) 2003-2004 - 2004, Westmoor High School or something? Can i just put that, or do i have to actually submit a copyright claim or something to some federal agency?

Also, I've always had a question on how domains work. Is there some kind of international domain name record keeper? Do they have "authorized dealers" that are therefore able to sell domain names?

As I understand it, those copyrights just mean "this is probably my own bloody work. Use it and die, unless you ask".

And domain names? Not my business. Ask someone else.

Are you worried that people are going to rip off your stories from some school newspaper? Most people have got better things to do, although after this latest round of silliness here at Massassi, maybe they don't.

Copyrights don't need to explicitly be placed on your site. Certain laws have been made which make anything you created and uploaded your own personal property and it is copyright thr second you upload it, placing a copyright symbol does not NEED to be done, but if you feel that you want it there or that you might was some of the images or articles used to not be stolen, placing a copyright symbol might make some would be theives think twice.

also, the (c) or (C) is not technicly reconized as an offcial copyright symbol, simply go to a website that has a copy right symbol and copy and paste the symbol to make it all offcial ©.

as for the domain name, the guy above me has it right i think.

I don't remember exactly, but I know that I saw on the Screensavers that there is a central DNS registry. I want to say that it's run by Berkley, but I doubt the truthfulness of that statement.

There are numerous DNS' that run in parallel with identical information (it takes time to synchronise with changes and new additions which is why sometimes it takes a while for a new website or IP change to propogate to everyone).

Then there are the top-level domains; .com .edu .gov .org .net etc (and country-specific ones). The people in charge of these can authorise creation of any domain below them in the hierachy.

For example the people in charge of .ac.uk (the UK academic top-level domain) will authorise domains for universities and colleges. Then if one of these has say warwick.ac.uk, they can authorise anything below warwick.ac.uk in the hierachy (eg dcs.warwick.ac.uk). Changes that aren't top-level are a lot faster because the data isn't stored on the numerous global DNS'.