In today's world, a blog can be a company's lifeline to the world. It can be a persons sole income. It can be the center-point of an entire business model. It can also be ripped off in no-time-flat.

Why? Simple: Money.

If Joe Company has an interesting blog, all the other guy has to do is copy it into his own blog, and now he's got the content. That person runs some advertising on his blog, does some traffic building, and he gets paid.

Is it a problem? You bet. Is there a solution? Sort of, but I wouldn't trust them, and certainly wouldn't pay for them.

Here's the deal: Blog copy protection software looks for copies of your blog online. You tell it to look for "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy hound", and that's what it looks for. If it finds it, it lets you know. Seems pretty straight forward. The problem is that the guys copying the blogs will always keep themselves a step ahead of the people searching for them. How? Actually, that's pretty easy.

The people copying the blogs are now using a little more sophisticated method to copy blogs. They're converting them to PDFs and images. Why? Again, simple. In order to search for text, there actually has to be searchable text to search. You can't search an image for text easily. You'd have to do some heavy processing to search a PDF from a site... and even then, which of the files would the software search?

I myself have had my blogs and articles appear as PDFs on a few sites. I've gotten emails from readers alerting me to this, and then actually stumbled across one of my articles one night while doing research for another article. I said, "Hmm, I did something on that subject, I wonder what this person has to say about it?" Turns out they said exactly the same thing I did.

So, what are we to do? Who do we turn to? Where do we go? Is there a software answer out there that will open up PDFs, read images, and compare them to existing content?

Those answers are a little harder. The truth is that plagiarism has always existed, and will always exist. Large companies have lawyers to help them with that. The small guys like the rest of us can easily use a boiler plate "Cease and Desist" letter to attempt to contact the owner of the site.

There's software to protect ebooks, but it's requirements and setup leave a lot to be desired - turning html content into an executable file.

There are services that claim to have the answer, however, by the time they make it to market, they're behind the guys doing the copying.

A better system would be to categorize the "Sploggers" in the same manner we do Phishing attempts. After all, we're being duped into going to their sites, and they're costing advertisers money.

The bottom line is that there's nothing we can do to stop blogs or articles form being copied. The same mechanism that we rely on to distribute our content is what is being used to copy and distribute our content. The best we can do is keep our content fresh and relevant, and make sure our readers know where to find the originals.