Anyone who's been online for 5 seconds has learned that there are a lot of unsavory people out there, lurking and sneaking around, looking for valuable stuff to steal. Online writers are especially vulnerable because it's so easy to copy and paste good content into another site, and because the demand for good web content is insatiable. It's really the Wild West on the net, but the outlaws are more ruthless and sophisticated.

Web Content Providers Among the Worst Offenders

Believe it or not, some of the worst perps are so-called "Web Content Providers." They get a gig from Scriptlance or some other writer's sweatshop that pays dirt (as in $10 for 20 500-word "articles"), with a totally unreasonable deadline, such as "must have tomorrow by 10 a.m." So how are they to achieve this totally impossible task? Very simple: Copy and Paste! And they almost never (never!) get caught.

Students Are Bad Scrapers Too

High School and college students, too, are a sub-set of this criminal type. I've taught plenty of Writing and English classes at both levels. Believe me, you just can't get it through most of students' thick skulls that copying and pasting from the web into their term papers is wrong. Even with the harsh penalty of an immediate F in the course if they get caught at it, they still do it! Well, over the past couple of years, more of them are getting caught red-handed and flunking. There's a little site called http://www.turnitin.com that's sunk a boatload of these kids.

Steps You Can and Should Take To Protect Your Online Writing

Without much windy prologue and explanation, I'm going to cut to the chase, and tell you what you, as a writer online, can do to protect your work. Bear in mind, no system is 100 percent thief-proof, but the more barriers you throw up, the less likely your good work is going to appear under someone else's name.

So here are the steps you can and should take, because your hard work deserves to be protected.

• Always put a copyright notice at the top of the piece of work, right under the title. It should look like this--(c) Copyright 2009 [or the actual year], [your name], All Rights Reserved. This is absolutely essential.

You are then protected by U.S. copyright law for intellectual property, and if someone does rip you off, and you catch him/her and take the puke to court, the courts will exact damages from the moron.

You do not have to file with the U.S. Copyright Agency to get this protection. All you have to do is put this notice on your work. (There are other instances when you should file with the Copyright Office, but this is not one of them and not the subject of this hub).

• If possible, save your work in a locked up tight pdf file that is copy-and-paste and print resistant before putting it online.

• Use Copyscape, http://www.copyscape.com, or some other similar service, that lets you put--for free-- a scary "DO NOT COPY!" logo in the color and size of your choice, on the work.

How Sites Like Copyscape.com Police and Protect Your Work

And every now and then, check in with Copyscape, and have them run a free web check to see if anyone has pirated your work. They run a Web scan that only takes a minute or two and then give you a detailed report of where and when your original work has been copied and pasted without attribution (giving you credit as the originator) into another site on the web. This is very, very cool!  I don't know how they do this, but they do, and I caught one fool who ripped off some of my stuff this way.

Rip-off artists are learning to pay serious attention to Copyscape logos and others like them on sites. It's kind of like having a big ADT sign in your front yard. It's a deterrent that can work.

Other things you can do, and which the big boys practice routinely:

• Encrypt your work.
• Use password protected sites.
• Write in Pig Latin.
• Use the Cyrillic alphabet.
• Don't write at all. (Not seriously! Never stop writing!)

The following are great resources for the online writer who wants to stop these low-life thieves!

Some of these sites specialize in specific kinds of online content and some zero in on specific places on the web where plagiarism can occur.

Plagiarism is serious business and costs all of us online writers losses in time and money. We can't just stand idly by and let the scrapers steal our work that we have labored over for so long. We have to be pro-active and keep looking for new and better ways to preserve and protect our online writing or eventually the whole online writing experience will be pointless and worthless..

I encourage all of you fellow online writers to keep seeking new and even more effective methods to safeguard our work. And if and when you find any, please let me know so I can keep up with new developments and share them with as many online writers as I can!

It stands to reason that if more online writers everywhere take action, content scraping will become harder and fewer scrapers will exist.  The reason it is so widespread is because very few online writers bother to check for plagiarism of their work and even fewer take action to stop and punish plagiarists.

Here Is What Copyscape Advises

In defending your rights online against plagiarists, it's important to be both vigilant and proactive. These four easy steps should help protect your content from being stolen:

1. Place a plagiarism warning banner on each of your pages to deter plagiarists from stealing your work.
2. Include copyright notices on each of your pages to assert ownership over your content (© is

   ©

   in HTML).
3. Use the automatic Copysentry service to detect and identify illegal copies of your content as they appear.
4. If your content has been copied without permission, take immediate steps to have it removed.