We've been noticing an increasing tendancy of people to simply go and take a well known columnist's writings and simpy copy and paste the entire thing and submit it as their blog entry here on JoeUser.com.

That violates the original author's copyright. You can use pieces of someone's article as part of your own article, that is known as "fair use". But you can't just wholesale copy someone else's work and submit it as your blog entry. Not only it is unethical but it creates a potential liability problem for the site.

If someone has written an article you strongly relate to, LINK to it. That is the nature of the web. Don't just repost what they've written. In the future, we will begin to remove articles that violate copyright (or edit them to link to the original source). Make your blog site your blog site, not a mirror of someone else's. Or alternatively, email the author and ask for permission to redistribute their article.