1. I’ve thought about how content registration would work, but there are a myriad of philosophical problems that arise when you let Google, or any other company, become the arbiter of online copyright.

A pinging method would work well except for the vast amounts of printed content that’s not online already. If I retype a section from a book and register it with the ad network online before the book author does, then I get paid for their work? Verification is tricky and goes beyond simply “who typed it first.”

re: Splogs – you’re right that formatting can be stripped from feeds, and it would be if it kept the splogs from making money themselves. I guess the trick is to let the splogs serve their CPC ads while you collect the CPM for your content.

I totally agree that this is an important problem. Link journalism is definitely part of the solution, but I also think that Google (et al) and especially Google News has to do a much better job of punishing duplication. But as you say, how does Google determine who was first? It can’t just go by when it’s spiders happened to crawl by. Perhaps a pinging mechanism of some kind would work well.

On splogs, unfortunately, I think they could easily be rigged to strip out your ad and even replace it with their own.

Tim