My colleague leavesnbloom over at the Nature Blog Network posted a really useful and cogent look at Copyright and Plagiarism. I learned quite a bit from it. If you’ve got a blog that you want to protect from scrapers, aggregators, and outright content thieves, you’ll want to read this ASAP!
Mike is a leading authority in the field of standardized test preparation, but he's also a traveler who fully expects to see every bird in the world. Besides founding 10,000 Birds in 2003, Mike has also created a number of other entertaining but now extirpated nature blog resources, particularly the Nature Blog Network and I and the Bird.
I’m not sure how much of a problem this is. I mean the kind of sites that rip content in order to sell advertising are easy to spot (even if you have adblocker on your Firefox, which you should!) and regular readers would invariably go to the actual source rather than some money-making knock off. It’s like mirrors of Wikipedia content – the real deal still gets most of the page views.
@Duncan: if you knew anything about recent German politics, you would be very sure of where the problem is! 🙂 😉