I know that pretty much everything you write is copyrighted. Not just in the US - but any country that agrees to the Berne Convention.

However there is no way I have the time or money to sue someone for something like this. There's simply no way I could do it.

Hence my idea of just getting the code compiled, it solves the problem of the Joe Perl Public with a bit of Perl knowledge from hijacking code. Sure, it doesn't prevent the experts from reverse engineering it -- but hey, I can life with that.