Proposal Copyright?

When submitting a proposal to a public RFP do you add a "Copyright. All Rights Reserved"? Would this confuse the organization requesting the proposal? Is this common practice?

My thought is that because this RFP is for the public sector, it may be viewable by the public. We wondered if it was common to protect the proposal from being plagiarized.

Thanks.

You certainly can do that but it's not required anymore for protecting your material. As soon as you put your proposal in a tangible form, it's protected, even without the notice. It's good practice to do so but as long as the author of the work is clear, there is no need for the copyright notice.

I don't know if it would confuse people. You do risk someone "borrowing" you proposal since it will be public record if accepted but everyone has that problem. I don't think they publish them unless they are accepted, but I could be wrong on that.