Stephen Davies, my counterpart in London, has had his custom blog design ripped off not once, but twice. Both times the theft appeared to originate in Asia. Others have had the same issue. And one blogger had success using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to get justice.
Blog designs, like any code, are really easy to steal. Just look at the source code and you have what you're looking for. Further, if you publish the full text of your blog in your feed, it's conceivable that someone can steal all your goods. Now might be a good time to do something about this before it really becomes rampant.
It seems to me like we can solve this problem with Open ID. The major blog publishing platforms should encourage their members to also sign up for OpenID (more information is on Wikipedia). Then they can have a mechanism in place that plants a special watermark on your blog once you've confirmed your ID. Basically, every time your blog is loaded it sends data to Open ID that then generate a special coded watermark on your blog confirming you're you. If it doesn't see the code then your content won't load. LiveJournal, Vox, Technorati and others do so but not in this manner.
Now I am not a web developer so perhaps this is naive of me. Maybe people can see the data flowing back and forth and still hack this. Thoughts?
