The Hypothetical That Took Down A Website

Columnist Keith Lee wants to know: if you're going to steal someone's intellectual property, why on earth would you steal from LAWYERS?

People like to get things for free, especially online. Even when things aren’t actually free. From Napster to The Pirate Bay, people have always sought out free avenues to obtain materials that they would otherwise have to pay for – “You wouldn’t download a car, would you?”

Writing, video, audio and other such intellectual property often seems a bit more nebulous to many people. When it’s all just 1s and 0s, people start to feel that ownership is a bit looser of a concept. It’s not, of course, and that’s why we have copyright laws. So that when people take your content without your asking, you can use the law to make them cease and desist.

And, as unbelievable as it is, people take content produced by lawyers too. In particular, from their legal blogs. Websites or services will go into a blog’s RSS feed or website and pull the content to be displayed on their own site or app. This is known as content scraping.

This week over at Associate’s Mind, I wrote up a website that was doing such a thing to numerous legal blogs in this post, Why Is Lawblogs.net Stealing From Legal Blogs?

Lawblogs.net aims to be yet another pre-curated law blog aggregator. It goes out and scrapes an excerpt and image of various law blogs, then displays the content on Lawblogs.net. It also has an option in the heading of the site to either open the full blog post or to stay within Lawblogs.net.

The business plan was then to have advertising all around the content that was displayed on LawBlogs.net. This was probably not the best decision. As Josh King put it:

OK, so that’s scummy, sleazy and probably not a high ROI endeavor. It would be much better to scrape photos of kittens, or celebrities, or well, pretty much ANYTHING other than content that is a) lightly-read (to put it charitably) and b) written by people who sue people for a living.

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The person behind Lawblogs.net immediately backpedaled, began re-working how the site functioned, and removed numerous blogs from the site, as there were now lots of angry lawyers paying attention to his website.

The following day, I put up another post about Lawblogs.net, Why Is Lawblogs.net Stealing From Legal Blogs? Part 2, in which I put forth the following hypothetical:

The $100 Bill On The Front Porch Hypothetical

Adam is walking along and sees a $100 bill sitting on someone’s front porch. No one was around, but Adam could see that the $100 bill was on someone’s property (to be lawyerly about it, their curtilage). But since no one was around, Adam decides he’s going to take the $100. But Adam is nervous about taking the $100, because he knows he took it off of someone else’s property.

Instead of spending the $100, Adam decides to put it into a savings account and just earn interest of off it. This goes along for sometime, with Adam happily earning interest on the money, while at the same time feeling good that he actually didn’t “steal” anything, because the money is sitting unspent in the savings account.

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Some time goes by and Bob, the owner of the aforementioned property, steps outside and realizes his $100 is gone. Bob, being a diligent homeowner, has 24/7 video surveillance of his front porch. Bob reviews the video and discovers that it was Adam who took the $100 bill.

Bob confronts Adam about taking the $100 bill. Adam says, “No no, I was just holding on to it. I didn’t steal it. It’s right here. There you go,” and hands Bob a $100 bill back.

  • Has Adam stolen the $100 bill from Bob?
  • Is the interest gained on the money while Bob’s $100 bill was in Adam’s savings account theft?
  • Did Adam have permission to take the $100 bill from Bob’s front porch, just because it was sitting there unattended?

It’s not perfect. The analogy is not quite right, but it gets the point across, particularly in regards to ad revenue. The person behind Lawblogs.net got the point and shuttered the whole thing. The site now re-directs to the original, German version.

I’m not thrilled with ruining this guy’s day or taking his website offline, but I also don’t like it when people attempt to piggyback off of other people’s work. Content scraping is not just “helping spread the information to a bigger audience.” It’s taking someone else’s property and profiting off of it. You’re not helping people find these blogs by having some aggregator online; everyone knows how to use Google these days.

But people continue to try. This morning, a lawyer sent me a link to another “aggregator” called JustLegalNews. It’s the same sort of thing as Lawblog.net was, although JustLegalNews is excerpting only a very small portion of the post it scrapes, as opposed to lifting some whole as Lawblogs.net had been doing. Of course, that doesn’t help much when some of the feeds it is aggregating include language such as the following in every post:

This feed is for personal, non-commercial and Newstex use only.
The use of this feed anywhere else violates copyright. If this content is not in your news reader, it means the page you are viewing infringes copyright.

Whoops. JustLegalNews is violating the copyrights of the blogs’ authors.

Like I said in Part 2 of the posts about Lawblogs.net, the authors of these blogs don’t need to tell websites to remove their content. The authors’ choice of license/copyright serves as proactive public notice as to how they wish their content to be treated. These websites have a duty to inspect the licensed used of the content of each blog from which they pull content. And generally speaking, they don’t. Because that would be hard and take effort, and that’s not what they’re into this for. They’re into this because it’s easy to take someone else’s content and make money off of it.

So everyone out there looking to make money off content from legal blogs, just don’t. Stop doing it. Or find some other group of people to piggyback off of. Like Josh King pointed out, the legal blogs just aren’t that well read, so you can’t be getting much traffic out of this. And it’s not like lawyers are apprehensive at the thought of litigation to protect their rights.

It’s actually kind of our thing, y’know?


Keith Lee practices law at Hamer Law Group, LLC in Birmingham, Alabama. He writes about professional development, the law, the universe, and everything at Associate’s Mind. He is also the author of The Marble and The Sculptor: From Law School To Law Practice (affiliate link), published by the ABA. You can reach him at keith.lee@hamerlawgroup.com or on Twitter at @associatesmind.