How to protect your marketing materials

I have to disagree in some respects, I spend a great deal of money on images etc (because stock images suck frankly) and I protect them at all costs.

Content and images can be protected using services such as DMCA protection pro. I have issues take down requests on many occasions and every time succeeded. Basically if a detection is made of using your copyrighted material then you issue a warning to remove the content, if they refuse then DMCA contact the web hosts to shut the site down.

Don't get me wrong there are certain times where even DMCA can do nothing about it, for instance pirate video sites where they are hosted offshore and DMCA have no power at all.

Protection Pro is not cheap however, and in some respects travlinguy is right because it is a real pain to issue take down requests.

There is an alternative though, which I try and use more often than not. This is to add a photoshop digimarc to your images. Then when you find people using them you simply contact the webmaster and say in order to keep using the image you need to provide credit in the form of a link back to your site (obviously if it is a spammy site then dont bother). This benefits both sites, they can use the image and you grab a backlink.

Rudi