That Good, Huh?

WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS BLATANT SELF-CONGRATULATION.  COMMON SIDE-EFFECTS INCLUDE NAUSEA, EYE-ROLLING, INVOLUNTARY VOCALIZATIONS, AND ENNUI.

We sure are getting popular, lately.  Without changing a thing, and without any apparent explanation, this blog’s daily hits have steadily tripled, while the quality inbound links (remember when that mattered?) have gone up about three times as fast as that.  We have no clue why this should be so.  Still, thanks to whomever is actually reading this stuff!

Plagiarism, however, is the surest sign of our apparent greatness.  And over the past couple of months there’s been a dramatic amount of blogs out there simply ripping us off.  In the “cut-and-paste the entire post, without author attribution or even a link to the original” meaning of the phrase.

Most of this plagiarism is committed by faux lawyer blogs, which don’t appear to be hosted by any actual lawyer or firm.  They seem to exist solely for the purpose of selling ads on pages containing other people’s writings that have been deemed SEO-worthy.  Without an actual person to chastise (too hard to track down, anyway) or a way to leave a comment about the plagiarism (comments are usually turned off on such sites), there’s not a whole lot to be done about it.  So we don’t.

More troubling is the exact same thing being done on blogs by real lawyers.  Googling some of our more popular headlines turns up more of this kind of behavior than we’d thought likely.  Yet it seems there’s plenty of actual lawyers out there willing to lift someone else’s writings and post them verbatim as if they were their own.  Astounding.  (We’re not going to give them any boost by naming names, and we do tell them to knock it off in private.)

We guess we ought to be flattered that so many out there think our blogging tripe is gems are worth copying.  And it’s not like they’re taking money out of our pocket or stealing clients — we don’t make a dime off this blog, and we certainly don’t write it in some misguided attempt to attract clients.  We’re not losing the ad revenue the faux sites are gaining (if any), and we’re surely not losing work to the copycat lawyers.  Nevertheless, it does kinda suck.

Still… that good, huh?