When HubPages tags Hubs as being duplicates it generally implies one of three things:

- You copied the content that appears on you Hub from work that someone else published on another site on the web. This is not only wrong but is a violation of their copyright which can lead to legal action against you and HubPages.

- You wrote the content and published it someplace else and then republished it on HubPages (or you published it on HubPages and then republished it someplace else). There is generally no copyright violation here as the content is usually yours.

However, while this is legal, both Google and HubPages frown upon (but don't necessarily forbid this practice) and Google may penalize you in terms of search rankings. You also run the risk, especially if your screen name is different on the different sites, of people seeing the item on the other site and assuming that you stole the content. This is not good for your reputation.

- Someone else has stolen your work that you published on HubPages and published it as their own. I use the term stole here because such an action not only enables that person to earn money (from advertising) from your effort but may also be taking money from you if they are drawing traffic and earning money from readers who would have come to your HubPage article had they not found the article on the other site first.

It is important to understand copyrights when publishing on the web or anywhere else. In the United States at least and probably in other nations a copyright is automatically created when a person saves almost any type of original intellectual or creative work on some form of media - paper, film, recording tape or any type of electronic media.

The work does not have to be formally registered with the national copyright office or even contain the copyright symbol and wording stating that the material is protected by copyright. Of course placing a copyright notice on the work and especially registering the work will serve to strengthen you case if you find yourself having to sue someone for copyright infringement.

For the most part, the fee for registering a copyright for an article being published on HubPages or similar site is at least $35 which is generally more than the author will earn for that item from AdSense revenues so it does not make economic sense to formally register such works.

It is also important to remember that intellectual property (property that qualifies for copyright protection) is a form of property and, like any other type of property, comes with rights that can be sold or traded away in whole or in part.

In the case of HubPages, item 6 of the HubPages Terms of Use clearly state that the authors of Hubs or third party owners who have given a Hubber permission to reprint an article, remain the owners of the material and only give HubPages the right to display and promote the material.

This means that you continue to own your original content and can sell or republish it elsewhere (of course if you sell the rights to the content to someone else you would have to either get their permission to leave that content on HubPages or remove it from HubPages).

HubPages, of course, does not pay us for the material we publish here and any earnings we received from the advertisers we are affiliated with are for clicks on the ads accompanying our content and not for the content itself. However, in the case of some sites, the owners of the site either pay us directly for the material we produce or provide the hosting service in exchange for some or all rights to the material we post there.

It is therefore important to read the terms of use for sites before publishing because we may be giving up some or all of our rights to the material when we publish with them. In this case, republishing the content on HubPages or other site becomes a copyright violation because, even though we created the content, we no longer own it or own all of the rights.

Copyright also applies to everything we post and not just the text of our Hubs. Photographs, videos and other graphic displays are also subject to copyright and we can be in violation of someone else's copyright if we copy or scan these items from the web or other published media without the permission of the copyright holder.

While copying such material, as well as copying text, is common on the web it is still illegal and the owners of this material can legally force us to remove it or sue us for damages.

While I have not found anything in the HubPages Terms of Use prohibiting the republishing of content on other sites, it is my understanding that HubPages discourages this practice and the other site may prohibit the practice. It is also my understanding that Google does not like this practice so, while legal, it should be avoided.

This does not mean that you cannot re-publish your material it in different format such as a printed magazine or newspaper article, in a eBook or even a traditional paper book, again subject to the rules and regulations of the publishers of those media.

Many of us find some of our work tagged, not because we stole it or published it elsewhere but because others have copied our work and have posted it illegally elsewhere.

HubPages is very good at using software to crawl the web looking for duplicates of our work and then reporting back to us the URLs for the stolen material.

If you are being tagged for this reason, then you should check out the URL's of the sites where your stolen content has been illegally published and contact the webmaster or other entity designated to handle this. You can usually find this clicking on the Contact Us link at the top or bottom of the web site's homepage.

While the process may be a somewhat involved with some sites (MySpace and Yahoo come to mind), my experience with most is that a simple email to the webmaster usually solves the problem and the stolen material removed within a day or two of sending the email complaining about the violation.

While there is a possibility of losing some ad revenue to the offender the bigger problem as I see it losing potential future rights to the material if it becomes so widely copied that it becomes impossible or too expensive to reclaim. Someone else could then be in a position to make a lot of money off of it and not have to share it with you if the piece suddenly becomes popular.

Following up on and reporting these violations is time consuming but it has become one of the costs of doing business on the Web these days.