Pretty much this. Some countries (namely the US and UK) have a copyright office that allows you to register the copyright of your work in that country only. I'm not sure how much it costs there - I think around $30-50 in the US depending on the work concerned.

While this gives you an easier way through court processes in the US and the UK, not registering makes it almost impossible to enforce as you'll have a hard time proving that you own the copyright if the other party falsely claims the same.

Germany and Australia do it a little differently. They have no copyright registration service, and if you want a formal and legally admissible record of your copyright, you'll have to take it to a notary, which costs a lot.

Irrespective of the perceived quality of your work, the point is, if you don't register your work before posting your stuff online, you're going to have a really tough time enforcing it.

I've seen enough conspiracies end to know when one has reached the end of its course. At least I enjoyed the peanuts I wasn't paying her while they lasted...

That was not my intention. I wanted to make it harder to copy large parts of text in digital format. At least OCR would still be necessary with screen captures. I believe that would deter many potential thieves.

@Nroug:
Better idea: you could even speak it. Speech recognition is probably even less wide spread than character recognition.

Also you could put in on a website with authentification and only share the login here. So at least search engines will never have it.
I made a small search. A typical price seems to be 50€ for a file of 50MB size. A little expensive for daily use but still reasonable. http://www.priormart.com/de/protect/preise

Another idea... make the characters as boring as possible... I think this is a good way to protect your ideas from stealing...

Bad thing about this, no one will enjoy a read through your story :)

Safe what?!? By now you should be aware of the fact that everything is in digital form gets shared, copied and "pirated". So you should keep with you the stuff you don't want to expose to the harsh Internet environment....

Not registering in the US makes it impossible to enforce. But, registration is just a formality. You have to register before taking legal action, there is no requirement that you register before the infringement occurs. And by the time you're about to go to court, the fee and the process of registering shouldn't be an issue.

For some types of works you can register with the appropriate guild. I know the screenwriter's guild has a service for screenplays where they register it and keep a copy for a decade afterwards. Quite useful before you go around showing the script.

But in those cases you generally just need to show that they had access to the work, not necessarily that they used it as that would be impossible in many cases.

Point is, any attempt to stop people from taking information posted online is ultimately futile. In fact, the more you go out of your way to make it a challenge, the more determined people become.

As an aside, does anyone else remember those silly javascript snippets that would disable right clicking in an attempt to prevent people from viewing HTML code?

But you know encrypting something is always easier than decrypting. You always make errors and always need to put effort in it. The point is, that people will not put much effort in breaking it, if there isn't much money to be gained. So even a low hurdle will deter many more of them than no hurdle at all.

As an example for a free text to speech tool:
http://dimio.altervista.org/eng/

Just try to have settings that are unusual. Maybe add some noise.

And there are simply cases where doing all that is simply OTT. This being one of them. At the end of the day if you're afraid that some random forum user is going to steal your idea and become the next Rowling or whatever, then do yourself a favor. Don't post it and avoid that stomach ulcer.

That may be right and many have given such advice here already. However the OP asked for what can be done. He can decide for himself if it is worth it.

"What is locked - can be opened.
What is hidden - can be found.
What is yours - can be mine."
-- Garrett

:-D