Content theft - How to protect your work

Here is a GREAT site covering content theft and what you can do about it (Thanks to my boy Mike at askpelini.com for this find!)
http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2006/04/10/what-do-you-do-when-someone-steals-your-content/

As I may have stated before, when you create something and put it in tangible form (eg. image, text, music) it is automatically granted a copyright to the creator.
This means that this blog, for example, is now my copyright and can not be re-produced by ANYONE without my permission...

I advise everyone who creates anything for the web (including blogs or images) to read the above article, But I will give you a brief rundown here as well.

First off, if you know someone has stolen your work, get a registered copyright or trademark right away. Even though your work is copyrighted when it is created, a registered copyright is bulletproof in court. In the United States go here to register your copyright or trademark - http://www.copyright.gov/.

Next, you need to find information on the person who stole your work. I used http://whois.domaintools.com/ to hunt down the domain owners name, phone number and address.
Sites like these can give you a TON of information to fight your battles, including the site's hosting company (which may be needed to shut the site down if the webmaster refuses to budge).
Another good site I just found is - http://who.securepaynet.net/WhoIsCheck.aspx?prog_iddomainspricedright
Just type in the name of the domain in question (eg google.com) and it will show you all the registered information for that domain.

Some other cool steps you can do is ask search engines to ban the site in question (after requesting said site to remove your content) and send E-Mails to the advertisers and sponsors on the site in question.

There are many MANY more steps you can take, all of which are quite easy to do, so just read the site posted above to continue your fight.

Also, read the comments at the bottom of Lorelle's page, I found this great site from post #2 about sending DMCA notices to the offending site's host - http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/?page_id=61


REMEMBER, don't give up! We need to fight these internet thieves!