Make money from blogs - Using CreativeCommons to protect your work

If you post content on the internet, then people will find ways to get to this content. They can get your content using your RSS feed, or directly copy from your site, and there are very few tools that can actually stop a dedicated thief from stealing your content. However, for the other people who copy your content in the belief that content available on the internet is free, and can be copied without any problems, a brief insertion of legal terms and a copyright notice can be enough to scare them. Read more information on this in a post (link to article):

You can put a small copyright policy on your blog such that it stops people from copying your content, and one easy way of doing that is through a site called http://creativecommons.org/. On this site, you can setup a copyright policy by asking a few questions, and you get a small HTML cope that you include in the template on your site. If you go to the specific site called http://creativecommons.org/choose/, you can specify whether you want your content to be copied to be used for commercial purposes, or even prevent modification of your work.

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Blogger: Beyond the Basics: Customize and promote your blog with original templates, analytics, advertising, and SEO (From Technologies to Solutions)

Make money from blogs: Worried that copying your content will affect your Google ranking ?

Blog publishers are typically worried that when multiple people copy their content. They worry that they are losing readers because their unique content is appearing in multiple locations, they are worried that they may be getting penalized by Google if Google detects multiple locations for their content and flags it as an attempt to fiddle around with search engine rankings. Here is an article that tries to explain this in more detail (link)

This can be pretty scary to blow publishers. So what do you in such a case if your content is being copied by others without your permission ? Well, Google issues clarifications that it takes into account many factors before going ahead with such a penalty.

Wordpress Plugin: Digital Fingerprint - How to identify a splog that is copying from your blog

One of the biggest problems facing Bloggers is the proliferation of copycat blogs. You post some rich content, the work of lots of effort, research, and something you really like, and suddenly it is being copied and posted onto other blogs without a credit (and for a normal reader, it would seem that the other blog is the creator of that content). And since you made your content available on the web, it is very very hard to prevent somebody from copying your content. You can try using some solutions that will put off some automated tools, and other solutions will thwart people who are less able, but it is impossible to prevent your blog from getting copied (even though you own the copyright to your content, the legal process for shutting down another blog can take time).
What you need to do is to find out quickly who all are copying your blogs so that you can take action geared towards warning these sites, and preventing them from copying your content. There are many tools / plugins that can do this, and one of these solutions is a Wordpress Plugin called 'Digital Fingerprint' (available at this site):
From the site:

This plugin helps blog owners stay vigilant against unauthorized content use by the overwhelming majority of blogs that are splogs. To combat splogs use of your content, this plugin will place a digital fingerprint, customized and tailored by each individual user of this plugin, into blog posts. The fingerprint is only visible in the RSS feed, not on the website itself. For example, already I have included my fingerprint in this post and unless you are reading this in an RSS reader, you haven’t seen it.
Once embedded in your post, the plugin allows you to quickly and easily search the blogosphere for references to the digital fingerprint using Google Blogsearch, BlogPulse, and Sphere (see the admin screenshot, above). It also allows the quick and easy search for your digital fingerprint of the web itself using Google, Yahoo!, and MSN.

You should refer to the site above, read the steps, and use the plugin; it can be real helpful in your effort to prevent people from copying your blog and going scot-free.

Make money from blogs - AntiLeech Wordpress Plugin: How to protect your RSS feed from getting copied automatically

For bloggers, a RSS feed is something critically important. With a RSS feed, you can build a set of dedicated readers who get pinged everytime you generate new content, as well as be able to control how much of your post you want them to see. If users are impressed with what they read, they will come to your blog more often to read other content on the blog, and spread the word around. So, having a RSS feed is critical. At the same time, a RSS feed is also a very useful tool in the hands of somebody who wants to make a simple automated system of copying your feed. Such a person will have a website build of content from many similar blogs, and automatically generate content from these different feeds. And since Google does not index RSS feeds, this other site will use a mechanism to take this feed and create a post on the other site. Of course, you hate this, but what can you do, short of stopping your RSS feed. Or you can take the effort to try and identify this person from your RSS feed and block, but it is no easy matter.
Another option is to use a Wordpress Plugin to try and give a different content to such an automated system (called a splog, a blog build from feed spammers who automatically take content from feeds and convert them into content on another blog, hence stealing your content). One way to reduce or prevent such stealing is through using a Wordpress Plugin called AntiLeech Wordpress Plugin (site). What does this Plugin do ?
From the site:

AntiLeech does not prevent the splogger bots from accessing your site. It produces a fake set of content especially for them that includes links back to your site (and mine, too, ok?) and sends it only to them. When they steal this content, it appears online just like normal, except now you've turned the tables on them and have provided them with useless content.
AntiLeech can detect a splogger bot using its User-Agent string (an identifier that some bots send when they are collecting data), or by IP address. You can enter a User-Agent or an IP address into the Options panel of your WordPress blog. When a visitor with a qualifying (any checked option on the options page) User-Agent or IP address visites your site, they will see only the generated content.

Read more about this plugin from other blogs at Google Search (link)