One of the webmaster message boards I frequent just tipped me off to a nifty tool:

Copyscape.com

It's just a part of internet life, I guess, but that doesn't mean I have to like being plagiarized. In the years that I've had this site, I've received a few handfuls of reprint requests, and I've never once denied one.

However, I take a totally different approach to people who use my stuff without asking. I cannot stand "scraper" sites — the websites that use bots to grab ("scrape") other sites' content and then present it on their own site, and as their own work.

If you're a blogger or webmaster concerned about these issues, then the Copyscape site above will come in handy. So far I've found two sites who've apparently used bots to lift my content and post it as their own.

(Last month I found a site created by an Australian mortgage broker who was publishing my "12 Steps From Debt" page word-for-word on his site, with no attribution to me or IYM anywhere. But I found him only because he was also hotlinking to my images on that page. I quickly "vulgar-ified" the images to which he was linking, dropped him a nasty email, suggested he go take a look at the page I restyled for him via the image change ... and asked him to either remove the page or give me the credit for writing it. The page disappeared. Have I mentioned that I still have a strong dislike for mortgage brokers?)

So far, using Copyscape, I've found three PDF'd issues of publications wherein somebody published one or more of my articles without (1) asking my permission, or (2) even listing me / my site / my URL as the original content-holder. Pretty ironic, isn't it, that two of the three pubs are of the "Christian Newspaper" sort? (Guess that's what I get for being a Dave Ramsey fan.)

Anyway, the bloggers among you might want to slap the URLs of a few of your more-popular pages into the Copyscape search tool, and see what shows up.

You might be very, very surprised.