That’s just it, they aren’t stealing your ideas, they are stealing your traffic. Entirely a different thing that someone copying say, your novel, and puting their name on it and trying to pass themself off as the real author.

In the case of traditional plagarism, there is usually a little of the “I wish I’d thought of that” factor. I doubt the spammers that stole bits of your site ever said “gee, this is good stuff, I wish I wrote like a middle aged geek” 😉 I doubt they looked at the content at all. They probably checked for certain keywords, indexed against traffic numbers and search engine responses and voila, you are “in”.

The computer and the internet are in some ways doing what assembly line automation did to manual labour; turning into a commodity defined by external standards. We talk of such things and “man hours” and “full time equivalents”. The labour itself is interchangable ( much less the person doing it! ) Not a lot of though goes into the value or quality of the work itself, but only in terms of numbers of output or throughput. Content doesn’t matter, only production figures.

And that’s the way these plagerists look at intellectual thought. Content is irrelevant, only the production numbers ( traffic, throught clicks etc ) count.

It’s interesting