It used to be when someone reused your work online without permission, you had two options. You could ignore them or lawyer up.

While the debate over the fairness of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) rages on, sending DMCA takedown notices is the standard practice – a practice that is not only out of date, but it also prevents the online content economy from reaching its potential.

For all but the most egregious cases, we’d like to suggest an alternative: Link Requests. Link Requests are notices sent to a web site re-using your work without giving you attribution. The notice asks for a link back to the site where your work was originally published. Attributor can monitor whether the link was added and report back to you.

Here are 10 reasons why Link Requests should become the new standard practice.

10. More Direct Traffic. Every link that points back to your site will result in more traffic to your site. Think of it as an affiliate program for your content – only you don’t have to pay for the clickthroughs.

9. No one wins when a DMCA notice is sent. First, unless you have an open and shut case, a DMCA notice can be a PR risk for the DMCA sender. Next, the site hosting the content has to deliver the bad news to its user putting them in an unfavorable spot. Finally, consumers lose overall because the result of content removal is one less place to find quality content.

8. Except Lawyers.

7. More Search Engine Traffic. Inbound links are the backbone on which your search engine rankings are built. If you get more links, your search engine rankings will improve. And no dodgy SEO tactics are required – you just make sure that all copies of your content link back to your site.

6. Freedom to Put Your Best Content Online. With the ability to harvest value from all copies of your content, you will no longer need to hold back your best stuff.

5. More Brand Awareness. Over 120,000 new blogs are created every day. By allowing your content to proliferate through this rapid growth channel, you extend your content’s reach exponentially.

4. The Link is Mightier than the Take-Down Notice. While it’s true that reusing text, images or videos without permission is basically theft, sending takedown notices to blogging moms won’t win you any new customers.

3. Fair Use is Debatable – Attribution is Not. You can’t send a DMCA notice if it’s Fair Use – and Fair Use is usually not a black and white situation. The fairness of asking for a link is indisputable.

2. Enter the Social Media Arena. You don’t need to take chances on viral videos taking off every quarter; instead, allow your linked content to proliferate – it’s your best asset.

1. Links are Currency in the Google Economy. If Marcus Aurelius were alive, he would say “A man’s worth is no greater than his inbound links” . . . and he’d be right. You’ve already earned the right to rank highly in search engines. Securing links guarantees your credit.

But don’t take our word for this – just read how smart publishers like CondéNet are recognizing that content proliferation is a strategic exercise. Executing this strategy is now possible by gaining web wide visibility of how and where your articles, images or videos appear. Link Requests are the new standard response to your content being copied.

What do you think? What other ideas do you have to resolve the current impasse?