The thing is that you are the copyright owner of the content that you create. Copyright laws depend on the country, but since Tapas is located in America, we have to abide by their laws. But that's not a bad thing for us since they're really strict about it. Unless you sign a contract where you would be sharing or stripping yourself off copyright, you are the only owner of copyright for your content. So yes, you are absolutely protected from plagiarism. The only way you wouldn't be protected from plagiarism is if you were to live in a country without copyright laws, where somebody could just claim your work as theirs and you couldn't do anything about it legally. But again, we are on the internet so voila!