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How to properly steal content for your law blog

September 19, 2007

Leading legal publisher and lawyer, Bob Ambrogi, posts on the never ending problem of law-related blogs that consist entirely or almost entirely of posts taken from other sources.

…[L]et me offer one example. The blog purports to be that of a company that provides services to the legal profession. All posts are ‘signed’ by the blog’s author and relate to the company’s services. But virtually every post is the full text of an article taken from another source. The blog does nothing to indicate this. It does not introduce the piece with an explanatory note and it uses no quotation marks or indentation to suggest it is taken from elsewhere. Only if you click through to the second page of the post and read to the very bottom is the source attributed. Granted, this is better than no attribution, but it is misleading and sure to confuse many readers.

In another example, the blog is purportedly written by two authors, both of whom provide services to the legal profession. The blog’s description makes it sound as if its posts are the authors’ observations. Here again, virtually all recent posts are taken in full from sources such as Law.com. This blog does better than the other, in that it identifies the source at the bottom of the post on the first page, rather than at the bottom on the second page. Again, however, no introduction identifies the article as from elsewhere and no quotes are used to show this.

Bob says he has no idea if these guys asked permission. I bet my house they didn’t. Heck, most of them do it to for Google Juice driven legally related keywords. They’re looking to run google ads or market ill conceived legal services products to unsuspecting lawyers.

Bob, you are being way too polite in your post assuming some have received permission by offering a few small steps to remedy this lack of transparency. Let’s just have rules on how to steal blog content. No need to create new ones.

We’ll use Greg Storey’s ‘How to properly steal the design of a website‘ as a guide.

In abbreviated form (with subtle changes), here’s 4 of Greg’s 5 rules we can label, ‘How to properly steal content for your law blog.’

  1. First things first, admit it: you suck. You’re a moron and a cheat. It’s likely that you’ll never ever really achieve anything in life because you lack the talent to create or to do anything for yourself.
  2. Learn. Yes, put some brain cells together, and learn how to properly edit HTML [write a blog post]. Sure, you think you already know HTML [content writing] because you’ve been able to cut-and-paste someone else’s code[content]