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All Is Right With The Universe

Nov 7, 2009
By Patrick.
Meta

Yesterday’s post concerning a “legal blog” which was publishing content of others as its own, without attribution, has been removed.  The owner stopped by with this comment:

Immediately addressed the issue.  Webmaster says he was linking to all original sources and just adding his own random thoughts prior to the link.  A Drudge Report model.  Defended himself by saying, [another blogger] hasn’t once given credit for ALL the Copyrighted Photographs on his site that he scrapes and then adds his cracks underneath”.  Nonetheless, I don’t like that it offended anyone.  Time to rethink having anyone do anything on your behalf.

I’m satisfied with this (after all, it wasn’t my writing that was stolen – I’m just an officious intermeddler), and have removed the post naming the scraper from public view.  It appears that the offending “blog” now redirects to the lawyer’s firm website.

Personal to EL:  I disagree, strongly, with the assertion that what was going on at your site was anything like what [another blogger] does.  Your site did not link to the source.  Your site did not provide attribution.  It simply lifted others’ posts, whole cloth, and made it appear as though they were written at your site.

When [another blogger] quotes others, he does provide links.  He does attribute.  He does provide valuable commentary beneath.  That isn’t plagiarism.

And you don’t owe an apology to me.  If anyone’s owed an apology, it’s Eric Turkewitz of the New York Personal Injury Law Blog.

Last 5 posts by Patrick

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2 Comments

  1. Jdog  •  Nov 7, 2009 @9:25 am

    It’s long since occurred to me that there should be some legitimate use of a non-lawyer employee to promote, maybe even via a blog, a lawyer’s services. Scouring the intertubes for writings that might be of interest to that lawyer’s potential clients, and reposting/excerpting (as appropriate, complete with links; I’m talking about aggregating, not appropriating), so that folks interested in whatever that lawyer does might be drawn there, potentially attracting some potential clients. (I’m assuming, for these purposes, that the simple-but-difficult method of the lawyer writing lots of interesting stuff is something that the lawyer either can’t or doesn’t want to do — time, ability, interest.)

    But to make it valuable, there’d have to be some value added — if only by selecting stuff that is interesting and unselecting stuff that isn’t — and that’s not something that can be outsourced to either some software or low-paid and low-skilled biological wetware that doesn’t know anything about the underlying issues.

    Sounds, actually, like something more suited for Biglaw folks, who could (should is another issue) spend a chunk of money that would easily stack up to five figures annually on the aggregator person, with additional time and money spent by associates monitoring it.

    What we see, instead, from time to time, is something like what this appears to have been — just an outsourcing of robotic scraping.

  2. Eric T.  •  Nov 7, 2009 @7:24 pm

    I wasn’t the only one that was scraped. For the first 6 days of November there were well over 100 posts.

    The webmasters that do this should not only be fired, but publicly identified. Perhaps after a few dozen of those, word will circulate in the legal world to be ultra-wary of outsourcing marketing and ethics, and word will spread in the webmaster community that they had best keep their noses clean when it comes to the lawyers.

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