I noticed recently that I was getting pingbacks from a site called AllAboutWordpress.com every time I published an update post for one of my plugins. It turns out that this is a site that re-publishes content from blogs, seemingly without permission. I have never been contacted to ask permission to republish my content, so I view this as content theft.
Luckily there is a nice plugin called AntiLeech by Owen Winkler that allows you to detect and blacklist content thieves, either by IP address or browser user agent. If a client that is crawling your feed matches the blacklist then you can either choose for them to receive some auto-generated Lorem ipsum text or a customised message. I chose a custom message, informing the (innocent) visitor to the infringing site that the content they were trying to view has been taken from my site without permission. There are links back to the original article permalink on my site to try and provide the potential reader with a good experience, and the content they were actually interested in.
Content theft is never a good thing for an author, hopefully AntiLeech will help to turn the tables.
