I had a problem with this recently, paid for some "original" articles up front from another forum member. Put them online and thought nothing more of it. Few weeks later thought i'd check how they were doing in Google using "text from article" searching. Surprise surprise, several other sites with the same article. One was a blog who was obviously the creator with copyright symbol. So down they come and seller wont reply. Always contact the webmaster first, then host if nothings done. If the host fails to act, contact their upstream provider or datacenter.
I tried something once that isn't entirely fool proof and is very bad in the eyes of SEO. Black background, white text. I knew people were stealing my content so I put after each paragraph in black text "© Copyright My Name ". I laughed it off and forgot about it, it wasn't a site I was really concerned with. Awhile later I viewed the search results for my site and my copyright was right there in googles results. I also noticed that the site traffic had gone down and so did it's rankings. I removed the copyrights, but not before searching for it, to see if anyone used the content. Sure enough...! There it was.
None of the poll answers are quite right for me. I don't know of any DP member that has stolen from me but my articles get stolen on a daily basis. I've long since stopped stressing about it, although it still irks me. It amazes me how many people blatantly ignore my clearly-visible terms. Especially the ones who thoughtfully include credit and a link to my site, e.g. "this article was taken from [mysite].com". Obviously they feel no need to hide the fact they they are ignorant lazy twits who can't read.
someone copied my content and posted it on their yahoo 360 blog. i filed a copyright repot to yahoo, the promplty said it was solved. all the did was de-list the site from yahoo which sucks becuase i still get penalized for dup content in googles eyes. they should have cancelled his blog and banned him. he hotlinked my image too so im thinking of creating a big hairy ass so when people go see his blog, they see a big hairy ass.
hehe, I've done similar things with images, although these days I shy away from anything that could be offensive. Usually I use an image of text saying something like "The owner of this website is stealing my bandwidth".
Glad I'm not the only one that does this Though I make sure it's a very mean phrase so hopefully it makes as many people leave the site as possible ...though in this day and age...no one visiting a site would care...