Lane Hartwell’s decision to make her Flickr stream private has spawned a passionate reaction from Robert Scoble and an analytical response from Mark Hopkins. It’s a great illustration of the dilemma that publishers of all sizes face when they learn how widely their content is being re-used.

So what can you do about it? At first glance, the options appear limited.

1. Call your lawyer and hope they can deal with it . . . quietly
2. Stick your head in the sand and let others profit from your work as it leaves your site.
3. Limit what you publish online, turning off the most powerful distribution channel on the planet.
4. Hire a sales force and treat every reuse opportunity as a sales lead just like Reuters is doing.

For many, the last option is clearly best. Your content leaves your site but you continue to get paid for it, either through ad share or a license fee . . . regardless of where it appears or which ad network is monetizing it.

Unfortunately, not everyone can afford a sales force, and, frankly, the market for your content may not as established as Reuters. Or maybe, they are only using a portion of your content.
But wait, there is another option – securing a link back to your content for each instance of re-use.

Why are links important? Google, Yahoo and MSN all base their search results on the number of inbound links to your site. If you aren’t paying attention to the number of links you receive, you’re probably not ranking highly in the search engines and you’re definitely losing out on traffic and customers.

How much is a link worth? It depends, but probably more than you think. According to Mesa-Ariz.-based Text Link Brokers, clients pay between $15 to $1,000 a month for a single link and $600,000 for a full service link building campaign.

And guess what - if your content is similar to categories we’ve analyzed, we’re not talking about a single link or handful of links. It varies by category, but in most cateogries we’re finding 10+ copies of every article that we track. In a search economy dominated by Google, this represents a tremendous traffic building opportunity.

Do search results impact traffic for other media types? Google announcement of universal search results – showing images, videos and text in a single result set – has already been embraced by Yahoo and indicates that search will become an increasingly more important channel for traffic across all media types.

So, I submit to those who know their content is being copied and care about it – there are new ways to act upon reuse so you can capture value for your content. It starts with links and, based on our product roadmap, will lead to even more direct monetization.