Steve Rubel of Micro Persuasion touched a nerve with his Saturday post on blog content theft. Steve outed a couple of “splogs” that have been republishing his content to produce ad revenues — without Steve’s permission and without linking properly back to his site. Steve appealed to the site operators by e-mail to no avail.

Splogs are a growing problem that highlight the challenges of “content as property” in the Web 2.0 world. Web 2.0 inventions such as the Creative Commons license appear insufficient to protect the work of bloggers.

Steve’s post elicited many passionate responses; Mark Cuban was among those who chimed in.

Media Orchard will act as Steve’s CliffsNotes and highlight the main thought currents and recommendations from the commenters:

1. Some suggested contacting the offending sites’ ISPs to have the sites taken down and/or Google to have their Adsense accounts cancelled. Citing the Digital Millenium Copyright Act is said to move the process along.

2. One suggested that fighting splogs was too much trouble, and that the better course was to monetize the stolen content with “an occasional hard-coded affiliate link.”

3. One recommended a site that monitors the Internet for content theft, called Copyscape.

4. And — of course — some suggested Steve was a control freak and should just chill out. Mike Reining of MindValley said: “I personally find the irony here pretty funny. Bloggers initially called out newspapers for not being open enough and now that the top bloggers become ever more powerful they are starting to act just the same.”

After commenting on Steve’s post, Mark Cuban was also inspired to post on the topic on Blog Maverick.

Media Orchard would love to sort all this out for you, but we’re afraid it would only make our brain hurt. Instead, we’re going to watch our beloved Dolphins beat up on the Chargers (don’t laugh.) Here’s to Steve for fighting the good fight.

Update: Dolphins 23, Chargers 21. Yesssss!

And Steve followed up Mark’s post with this one.

Technorati tags: Content Theft, Steve Rubel, Copyright, Creative Commons