There certainly is a way of stopping people from printing those copies wholesale on their web sites. If I put up entire albums free for download on my site, I'd have some angry bands after me.
I'm fine with the things I put online being passed around, but when a site replicates it all and takes my traffic, it means I lose viewers and popularity. I dislike things like FriendFeed as-is, because I don't like that there's no way to track conversations about me online. (Somebody ought to make a solution to this so I can give them some money.) It's much worse if they're actually stealing my writing rather than just linking back.
If two people hand in the same essay in school, how do you know who actually wrote it? It is a judgment.
A judgment based on things like writing style analysis, which is pretty easy. I have blogs steal my posts wholesale pretty often, and most people stealing your writing do a really shitty job of it.
I am not talking about what you think is fine or not fine I am talking about what is possible and actually happening.
What is actually happening is that so far nobody gives a damn about writing enough to prevent blatant infringement. It's not an incredibly hard problem. Youtube is solving a much harder problem with their audio/video copyright issues, and while their solution isn't perfect it's certainly stopped me from using them to reliably find movies and songs. The music I do find there is the sort of stuff that's not popular enough for the band to care. If they did, those videos would be gone within hours.
Remember that there's a copyright on text just as there is on anything else. Nobody enforces their copyrights because so far there aren't particularly huge rip-offs that are costing writers money, but if somebody ever does create anything that's effectively leeching then suing him would be ridiculously easy, since on the Internet everything is archived and most things are stored with dates. You couldn't possibly steal one of my blog posts and get away with claiming it's yours, and so if I care enough to go after you you have no defense and have clearly broken the law.
Ironically, this is due to the lack of a text content industry service that crawls for copyrighted works -- like the ??AA.
They're having such a hard time because it's not automated yet and they care too much. Providing for free (or with attribution) is fine. Plagiarism is not.
In other words, RIAA shouldn't employ MediaSentry; MediaSentry should sign up content producers for cheap p2p checking and a MediaSentry analog for text should sign up content producers for cheap copy checking.
New model: bloggers and newspapers make money from ads, spend money on content checking. If your content can't support its own uniqueness via ads->anti-plagiarism, you lose.
Persecution doesn't necessarily mean a lawsuit, when it's an instantly verifiable claim. If everybody is doing it, then it's a matter of finding and reporting those people, and either having it removed or pressing charges against the criminals involved. (Once it reaches that point, a lot of people will find ways to stop ripping off writers. I hope it doesn't reach that point any time soon.
