Prior to the Internet, stealing another person's ideas was hard and rare. Now, however, someone can take what you have and potentially run with it in a blink of an eye.

When you have an idea and the sheer fear of it being stolen invades and interferes with your progress, keep the following in mind:

* It's your idea. When the pet rock as invented, do you think the creator of it was saying, "what if someone else does this after I do"? Not likely. The idea was fresh and new and so far out there that the minute it hit the market, only the creator would own the idea. Now, maybe your idea is simply a unique twist around one or several things. That's ok. As long as it hasn't been oversold by others, there's a good chance that what you're offering will be the only one of it's kind!
* What's wrong if your information is so good that people want to pass it around? Good for you. The more people who see it, all the better for your. Think of it as free exposure. Someone reads it, gives it to a friend, and that person reads it and decides it so good that he/she signs up for your newsletter and/or buys product. You just got free advertising and you made money. (In fact, you should give the person commission who shared the information!)
* Protect yourself from the get go. Copyright every page of your web site and/or document, with the applicable disclaimers where they're appropriate. Put this information everywhere in the document - like a nagging mosquito at a summer party. If someone doesn't get the hint to leave it alone, don't worry about: bad karma will come back to them.
* Keep track of your information online. To find out if your content is somewhere else, use a web-based application such as CopyScape. You can pull down their banner and put it on web pages, in documents, etc. Likewise, go to a search engine and type in some unique phrases for your information and see where else it shows up. (I did this for a paragraph on my home page and discovered a travel agency in the Caribbean had used it. Do I care? Not really, because they aren't a competitor to what I do.)
* Ensure that what you say is original. If you're so worried about your ideas being stolen, make sure you haven't taken your information from someone else! Yes, it's fine to quote someone and give them credit. But taking their idea and only altering slightly make you the idea stealer - and a hypocrite!

Instead of worrying about what might happen, focus on what is going to happen with your idea: you'll become the expert, you'll make the money, and you'll be the one who gets the idea out their first!