For those who have experienced www.copyscape.com, or something similar, how useful have you found it in stopping others stealing your text/pics? Obviously there are some texts that will be picked up on numerous sites (e.g. caveats) but I suppose it?ll be useful for those with blogs?

I have started to think about embedding my photos with my name and website address. Put it quite prominently then they won't copy. Anyone else have any ideas?
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Do you mean watermarking? It's always a good idea - then if anyone steals your pics, they'll just be sending more traffic back to your real website.

You can get simple software to do watermarking for you - I use iWatermark for the Mac. A Google search will find you tons more.

Making your website text super-personal is a good idea, too - if it's all, "one is an excellent courtesan" kind of generic, it's easily scanned, copied and pasted by someone knocking together their own site.

If anyone tries to steal my rubbishy, angry, ranty blogposts I'll be genuinely surprised.

For those who have experienced www.copyscape.com, or something similar, how useful have you found it in stopping others stealing your text/pics? Obviously there are some texts that will be picked up on numerous sites (e.g. caveats) but I suppose it?ll be useful for those with blogs?

To return to this one, I might as well share that I did my regular (but obviously not regular enough) run through of my individual site pages through Copyscape earlier on today. I found a grand total of FOUR completely different and unrelated ladies using cut and pasted content from my site - one in particular had not even bothered trying to cover her tracks by changing the odd bit, and has literally cut and pasted virtually my entire site into her own with the only things changed being specific services, availability and so on. She's in Leeds. Another is in bloody India.

So in addition to a week busy enough work-wise for me to now be sitting up to my waist in Lanacane as well as all manner of cobblers to deal with on here and elsewhere, I have now had four domain owners and hosting companies to track, four varyingly terse emails to sit and write and send and a dozen or so links to faff about cutting and pasting in order to substantiate my emails. Just what I needed.

I would recommend everybody bungs their site, page by page, through Copyscape at least once a month. After today, I wish I had (and these are only the ones that CS could actually find!)