Tom over at The Media Drop checked in with Reuters today in regards to their announcement at p2pnet.net that Reuters will employ their new toy FAST (Fast Search & Transfer) technology to "go after sites that post whole articles, or portions or paragraphs, without specific permission."

Wondering how this applies to bloggers, Tom asked Reuters straight out and got an equally straight reply
"The tool has been designed to identify where a party goes beyond fair use of our stories - where they copy a full story and post it without license or they derive a story from our content without sourcing it."

Somewhat related - previously on MeFi "A good amount of bloggers are outright thieves. Researchers at Hewlett-Packard Labs found that a vast amount of popular bloggers stole ideas, topics, and content from lesser-known weblogs without any sort of attribution or crediting."

From this Wired news Warning: Blogs Can Be Infectious , the researchers have created iRank here where you can watch the memes spread around the worlds blogs. Very interesting toy.