By law, anything you write, as soon as you write it, is protected by copyright law. Does not matter if you are a professional writer or not, if you wrote it, it’s your content. No one has the right to simply take your content and use it on their web site, blog or newsletter.
Normally I don’t worry about it too much, if the person who as taken the content as cited me as the original author, and linked back to my web site. That’s just normal-good manners. In fact I usallay have a tool on my web sites and Blogs to make it easy for a visitor to grab part of an article and post it on their own web site, which include a link back to the original article. Again, it’s just the way of the Internet world — this grabing-and-linking of content.
However, some people don’t like playing by the rules, and there are ways to find out if pages of your web site are being used by someone else. Copyscape is a search engine specifically for finding such leeching web site owners. You put in the link to the page you want to check. If you are checking your blog, start with the front page (i.e. http://www.glennhefley.com/blog ). Copyscape will then search the web for sites that have the same conent.
