For bloggers and designers who've spent many hours writing copy for a Web site, one of the most annoying things that can happen is to have somebody copy and paste their work word-for-word and paste it on their own site - many times with not so much as a credit link. You own the copyright, but who has time to scour the Internet for content thieves? Copyscape has the answer.

Copyscape helps you in the battle to protect your content. Simply enter the URL of your Web page and let Copyscape do the rest.

For the sake of testing, I chose an article I wrote about Customizing your Mac OSX experience a few years ago, which originally appeared on the old CreativeGuy blog. I chose it because it was extremely popular, so I knew there was a good chance it would turn up in a search.

A few seconds later, Copyscape listed a site which apparently had a copy of my article. A quick glance at the summary (pictured below) told me that Copyscape was at least somewhat accurate, because I recognized my copy.

Sure enough, a rather over-enthusiastic blogger in Kuwait had taken my entire article, word-for-word (all 2,500+ of them), and pasted it on his own site. What's funny is that he didn't bother to download the images I used on my original server and upload them to his own, instead choosing to just hotlink directly to them (see the image below).

So he's not only committing plagiarism, but he's stealing bandwidth as well. Before this turns into something I don't mean it to, let me say that I really don't care about this particular incident all that much. The blogger did have the common decency to at least make the headline of his article link directly to the original article on the CreativeGuy blog. Unfortunately for him, I have since removed the original artwork from the CG server, so he has nothing but empty boxes on his site now.

But let's get back on track here. Copyspace obviously works quite well. For bloggers, writers, designers and developers, it could just prove to be an invaluable tool in protecting your content. The service offers 10 searches per month for free. A premium version offers unlimited searches at just 5¢ per search. You can also set up scripts to check pages automatically, and exclude certain sites from the search.