Prompts and motivation to create something out of nothing

DO I RETAIN COPYRIGHT?

This question comes up about twice a week on this sub. TL;DR: YES

Our sidebar states that:

All content is © by the original authors.

/u/RyanKinder's comment on copyright.

And Reddit's own user agreement states:

You retain the rights to your copyrighted content or information that you submit to reddit** ("user content") except as described below.

By submitting user content to reddit, you grant us a royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, unrestricted, worldwide license to reproduce, prepare derivative works, distribute copies, perform, or publicly display your user content in any medium and for any purpose, including commercial purposes, and to authorize others to do so.

This basically just means that you're giving them permission to host content that you post on their website, but all the content that you create is yours. The person who wrote Rome Sweet Rome (A story on reddit) was able to sell the movie rights to a producer and own them himself.

Prompters do not hold legal claim to their prompts. They're just ideas, nothing more. The people who write the stories in response to the prompts do however hold legal claim to them.