Who is stealing the content?
The majority of thieves are amateurs who are trying to earn a bit of cash on the side. They use such simple, cheap website creation tools as Blogger, TypePad, Homestead or Moonfruit to quickly create websites that they populate with content they cut and paste from sites around the Internet. Or, easier still, they take RSS feeds from sites and have the content automatically delivered to their new sites. Whilst most the thieves are amateurs, they are not the biggest problem. The sums of money that can now be earned from online advertising have attracted the attention of far more organised gangs. New tools have been developed that can strip thousands of articles from legitimate sites and use them to populate thousands of websites. Some of these tools are programmed to change words within each page so they are harder for the author to trace. This has become known as synonymizing. These professional content thieves don’t care what they are stealing and from whom (although they avoid plagari
