suppose I want to buy some article righting services to publish on my site. How do I know as soon as I have put them out, they won't be scraped immediately and won't appear on other sites as is, spun, or rewritten and ranking higher in google then the ones on my site that I have spent money on? Or are most articles being written to submit the to article directories and get backlinks rather than use them on own sites?
Sadly there will always be thieves who steal or re-purpose other people's content. If you find them, you can use the DMCA process but that doesn't always yield results. Google is slowly getting better at dealing with the issue but in my opinion, they have a ways to go yet. Unfortunately, it's simply the way of the web and you either have to live with it or find something offline to do to make money. As far as I can tell, the vast majority of purchased articles are being used by the purchaser on their own sites. In Google's Panda update, a lot of the article directories were hit hard. I think fewer people are using article directories to promote sites now as a result. I wouldn't let the fact that people steal articles stop you from putting quality writing on your site. Generally speaking, once you get your site established and have the Google spider visiting regularly, Google should rank your site higher than anyone else who uses your content. If your site answers a visitor's question/needs or points them to someone who can, they won't see the thief's site further down the SERPs anyway.
With duplicate content, whoever posts first gets the benefits and whoever does after gets penalized, so you won't get hurt that much from content stealers.
Duplicate content works on a first come first serve basis. If the original content is first on your site and then duplicated elsewhere, you're out of Google's net.
that would be if google index and rank it quickly, otherwise if someone steals and republishes it first on a higher pr site, google might rank them better and treat original as a duplicate?
Google always indexes my pages in 1-3 days 3 days being very late. If someone is that worried about it you could probably build a site map and submit it to google and it will be spidered usually with in an hour or so.
If you haven't registered any art of yours, you are still protected by the "passing off" law. be sure to at least read a trademark or branding book before comensing logo/identity design
If your content gets indexed first will be what is key. If it takes 3 days for Google to index then you may want to ping the posts with pingfarm.com or pingdevice.com to try and get them indexed faster. There are also plugins that you can use if you use Wordpress that pings a host of sites to help with indexing
Just would like you to know. Somebody copied a large piece of my website (with putting the backlink reference thought). When I search for that exact snippet (in quotes), only 2 websites show - mine and the other. Mine is the second.......
You have to know how to check the originality of any content provided by your freelancer. You can try Copyscape. Duplicate content will surely hurt your rankings and your business in the long run.