Then I may have grasped a solution. Google, Yahoo, MSN, and other major players can agree on a standard whereby authors submit content to search engines before making it public online. Submitted content is tagged for time and author, but not made listed in SERPs until made public on site and crawlable to search engine spiders. The author is notified immediately that content has been tagged. Then the author can display content publicly with greater assurance that scrapers will not be indexed favorably by search engines.

Time and author tags provide search engines in-house tracking that could be used to determine authenticity after content is indexed. Obviously, if you submit your content before making it public for indexing, then you probably are the author. Page rank and relevancy could be pegged to authenticity. Duplicate (scraped) content could be spotted immediately and ignored or penalized without jeopardizing the original’s SERPs.

Those who submit content must have Google, Yahoo, MSN accounts, etc. (This would make it an easier sell to search engines.) All older content is grandfathered. In other words, content already indexed cannot be resubmitted for authentic tags. So I cannot submit my site’s present poems for tags, only new poems. Someone could steal another’s content, such as one of my handwritten poems, before the author submits it to search engines for tagging. In that case, the author could file a DMCA takedown notice and go to court if necessary, just like we have to do now.

How do author and search engine reconcile authentic tag to content location (URL) before content is made public? The author must tell the search engine at what URL the content will appear, although the content will not appear at that URL until a future date.

What if author wants to move content from one URL to another? The author could log into his or her account and change the authentic tag’s URL information. This probably would be the most difficult problem this idea faces. Web sites go dark, and the author uploads old content elsewhere at a later date, etc.

What if author loses and cannot obtain again his or her login information? In the short term, I am not sure. In the long term, defunct accounts could have submitted content untagged after, say, a year has passed with no account activity. This would not negate copyright protection, but search engines need to clean house from time to time.

I think authentic tagging would work much better than the ragtag system we have now. Will bloggers still copy and paste? Will scrapers still scrape? Yes, but your original content would be ranked more favorably than theirs if tagged. Their “content” might be ignored altogether. What do you think?