[dkokelley]

Well, officially once you write something, it is copyrighted. You don't have to pay $35 to put © on it. However, in order to have some legal recourse if someone takes your work, you will want to be able to prove prior art (basically that you wrote it first).

If you want to use the site to host your unpublished/unfinished works, why do you need them in the source code? Why not hide them?

If papers and essays are all you will be using the site for, you might consider just installing Wordpress and using it to manage everything. It will keep unfinished works hidden until you're ready to publish them, and Wordpress has a datestamp that can be applied to posts to give some simple protection. Of course the datestamp could be altered and there's nothing keeping me from copying everything and putting an earlier date on it.

[gojomo]

(You mean "prove original authorship" rather than "prove prior art".)

The act of publishing might create a reliable record of first authorship, for example if the material becomes quoted or replicated in third-party systems with timestamps not trivially changeable by the disputants. (Simply using a web host or blog service not completely under the writer's control might create such records.)

But, if you really want to prove authorship as of a certain date, you may want a timestamping service:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_timestamping

[paulgb]

Just FYI, prior art has to do with patents and is an unrelated concept. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prior_art

[dkokelley]

That's absolutely right. I was just reading about patents somewhere else and substituted the terms. Thanks for the catch.