If you create a tangible literary, scientific or artistic work, you own the copyright on it automatically. If you want allow others to legally publish or even alter your work, you can use a creative commons license which specifies what rights you give others, freely available at http://creativecommons.org/ See also: http://www.copyright.gov/ http://www.whatiscopyright.org/

I hope it wasn't poetry.com. Every one that enters there gets "published." They release about 12 books a year and you only get published in the book if you pay for your own copy. I was a sad sad bistandard.

I wouldn't submit to *any* website that said it would publish me. What ifknheartsublime said in answer two is quite correct. There are many companies out there who claim to be publishers (well, they publish books don't they?!) but their aim is make money from people with no thought about the poems at all. They rely on people's vanity: "oh, they've published my poem... I *must* buy the book it's in." A story: a friend of mine had a job in one of these publishing houses (not internet based, they advertised in newspapers) and she was given the task of going through the mass of submitted poems, correcting spelling mistakes and making sure as many fitted on a page as possible. She told her boss that she didn't really approve; her boss laughed. The books were sold for a large amount of money to the contributors only - you'll never see them in bookshops. She wasn't in that job for very long. If you want to get published steer clear of internet-based publishers. Get involved with local groups and local publications; ask at your library about poetry journals that are available and read them before submitting - don't be put-off submitting to foreign ones either!; go to poetry readings (libraries can help here as well); etc. Lots of options in the Real World. Also, writing poetry is very, very unlikely to make you rich... there are only a handful of people in the whole world who can make a living from writing poetry. Most have another job that allows them to eat. Forget about the payment, publish your poems because you want to. But publish in places where it actually counts. These websites don't count.

yea i had one "published" on poetry.com and i used my credit card to pay for a copy of the book...but never got it....

Sure... YOUR copyright is yours, they are saying. Since you submitted it online, it's published there, and you still have the copyright. They are just telling you that they have published it in a book with other poems, and you still own the copyright to it, though THEY own the copyright to the collection. NOTE: I will lay you odds that if you read the terms and conditions of the site, they say that any poem submitted to the site (whether for a contest or not), they have a limited license to use however they see fit, unless you tell them otherwise. Well, they saw fit to publish a book, and try to sell it, and you didn't. Besides, many of those books are pretty "vanity"-type books, where the only people who will buy them are the poets, themselves, to PROVE they have a poem published in a book.