If the actual HTML source is stolen, some odd comments or affectations would be enough to detect with your own web crawler, and prove it is not original.

With cut&paste from the browser window of a paragraph, it probably loses all of that.

You might also embed a code via steganographic techniques, using only the content that isn't affected by formatting (so, extra spaces are out, etc.). I played around with that here.

—John

In reply to Re: Mangling HTML to protect content, and finding stolen HTML content by John M. Dlugosz
in thread Mangling HTML to protect content, and finding stolen HTML content by nop

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