How do you protect yourself? And, what can you do if someone steals your content?

If you have been blogging for any length of time then you have probably come across a site that has blatantly ripped off your material and posted it on their own site without credit in the form of a link to you. This is copyright infringement and has become a common occurrence on the Web.

The first thing you should know is that you don't have to register your material for it to be copyrighted. Virtually anything produced be it written, drawn, photographed or played ala music is protected by copyright law. This doesn't mean you are safe though as many people don't know or worse don't care that copyright applies to the internet as well as the usual mediums.

To protect yourself you can use a service like

copyscape.com.

This service is free for up to 10 pages a month and offers a paid service if you are a frequent victim of content theft.

I ran a couple of my pages this morning and you guessed it... one site is basically stealing most of my content for their site.