Forum Moderators: not2easy
Make sure you note your copyright on every article and link to a copyright policy for your site.
Your experience may be different, but I have had a site for more than 10 years, with by now 300+ articles, and I've never had a serious problem with copying--some blogs scraped some articles, but they never got indexed by Google, and were gone within months. Nuisance stuff.
You need a crash course in basic Copyright law and a light dose of Intellectual Property law. As far as the written word is concerned, you should be aware that as soon as you publish, your work is protected. However, it helps to know how.
My suggestion would be an occasional dip into one or some of the many great copyright reference sites online. Here is a selection:
US Govt Copyright Office [copyright.gov]
Stanford University: Copyright & Fair Use Center [fairuse.stanford.edu]
Cornell University: Copyright and the public domain in the USA [copyright.cornell.edu].
Those links presume you're in the USA. If you're in the UK, here's the best resource I've found to date:
www.own-it.org [own-it.org]
If you're in neither country, search online for your national copyright office. That should be a good starting point.
To get an understanding of the bigger picture and how copyright law works across borders, you should search for information on the Berne Convention.
I hope these links will be of some help.
Syzygy
