This afternoon one of our readers alerted us to some plagiarism of Mashable content. While seeing Mashable stories re-printed word-for-word on splogs is nothing new, the source here was somewhat surprising: Associated Content. The company has raised $10 million in funding, and counts industry heavyweights like Google VP of Sales Tim Armstrong and investor Ron Conway on its board.

The content in question is under the account of roemverda. As recently as yesterday, there were more than a dozen Mashable stories, copied word for word and posted to Associated Content. Here’s one especially egregious example: Mark’s feature story “12 Things We Want Fixed on the Web,” which he spent the better part of the afternoon writing, copied exactly to an Associated Content page:

What’s surprising here is that content submitted to AC supposedly goes to an editor before being published. I tried it out myself, and indeed submitted content first goes through a review process before being posted. The following line, which is the first sentence in Mark’s feature story, should’ve been an automatic red flag:

“We here at Mashable have been going back and forth on the things we'd like to see for Christmas this year …”

That, and the sheer volume of content a single person was able to produce in one day should’ve raised some eyebrows at Associated Content, but in this case, it did not. Meanwhile, Mashable is far from the only victim. Taking a closer look at roemverda’s account, there is plagiarized content about all sorts of different topics – estate planning, gift baskets, and day trading are just a few of the other topics he dips into. Apparently, his incredibly broad array of knowledge also isn’t a red flag for AC.

While the company publicly states that those that infringe copyrights will be banned for life from the site, the loose editorial policy allows content to be published and the company to make oodles of cash from the ads, while they wait for someone to become alerted to the fact their content was stolen. This policy allows the company to claim “no foul,” and in reality, is probably compliant with DMCA. But it’s ugly, and not something I would expect those involved to want to have their names associated with.

So what's really going on here?