What stops my article being stolen?

[lissie]

Apologies if this has been answered elsewhere but I can't find it.

It seems common practice especially for shorter articles to be reproduced in full on the "view article" screen. Its also easy to select and paste the text to another window. What's stopping the unscurpilous (sp) from doing just that ? Do I need to make sure that I have a signature phrase somewhere in the article to check for thieves ? Also I noticed somewhere that CC makes sure that articles details pages are not indexed by the search engines. That means if someone steals my work and then reproduces it elsewhere, someone who subsequently buys it legally may get hit with the duplicate content flag even if they buy "unique" rights because it was first indexed on the thief's site.

Thanks for any clarification.

[Constant]

There are only so many ways that we can protect the integrity of your writing. One of the ways is to make sure that you DO NOT post the entire article in the long description section of the submission. We also keep our eyes open for articles that are printed outside of the boundaries for permissible use. If you have any ideas for increasing the security, I will be starting a section for comments to help us as we go through the initial stages of revamping and reconceptualizing some aspects of the site.

[Celeste Stewart]

I use Copy Sentry to monitor many of my articles. It checks for duplicate content once per week and reports any new occurances. It costs about $5 per month for monitoring ten pages.

[melissan]

I periodically check my articles that I haven't sold (but have a large number of views) at www.copyscape.com. For .05 cents, you can run your article through copyscape. If it is on the internet anywhere, copyscape will most likely find it. When I sell an article and I want to know where it is, I do the same thing and I find articles easily this way. CopySentry can be signed up for, but if you don't have a large number of articles that you are monitoring, just doing random checks yourself will be enough to satisfy your curiosity.

[lissie]

Yes I think I need to start using copyscape; I've always been too cheap but...