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You can take any content published on the web and use it as your own… Sure, it's a very good idea to have some kind of verification (like "post this code on the site"? some kind of email verification? or at least send a mail to some contact on the copied site to inform the legitimate owner?), but still… you can just use copy&paste anyway. People are very skilled in it.

If this is the case, why doesn't Posterous just copy all the Ning blogs and say "hey! your already here!"?

Interesting idea, but I'm guessing users wouldn't really like that very much.

Because it's copyrighted?

I assume the parent comment was referring to the technical feasibility of reproducing content, not the legality.

Because someone would, very likely, sue them?

You can already do that with nothing more than a simple wget + sendmail script.

Easy fix to this would just be to get them to make a new blog entry with some keyword to indicate ownership.