copyright's

how do you obtain a copyright for a website, and what does it cover?

It is very hard to copyright a web site unless the web site itself has unique material that cannot be located anywhere else on the internet. Best bet would be to contact a business attorney on this issue, especially one that covers online issues.

The Digital Millenium Copyright Act of 1998 http://www.educause.edu/issues/dmca.html was established to cater for copyright of digital materials (DVD's etc)
Jcaputo is right, you would need to seek expert advice. It is also very hard for someone to 100% replicate the back-end of your site.
My understanding however is that as soon as you put pen-to-paper as such, certain copyrights are automatic.

One thing to consider though, in an open-source environment, you can not stop someone from using your code, as this is the purpose of open-source.
Just my thoughts

what about this post?

http://forums.devshed.com/showthrea...bsite+copyright

this is actually not that hard... to copyright any programming code you must send on cd your code along with the first 25 pages of code and the last 25 pages of code (only the first 25 and last 25 pages are shown because people from different countries have access to the code that is copyrighted and they tend to copy the data and just reuse it so now just the first and last 25 are shown).

However... you can get a copyright based on use... like most people do... just by putting a notice at the bottom of your page. Obviously it is better to have something on record but again it is not required. You can write something on a napkin at Burger King and it is automatically copyrighted by you.

Now as for posts... the poster is the one that owns the copyright to them. There is no privacy policy or anything that can take away their rights to their own material that they post on your site.

I hope this helps a little. There are many books on the copyright law and since intelectual property law is really based on copyright law it is good to know it.