In Which I Am Not Happy With Steve Greenleaf

 Posted on February 22, 2014 in Uncategorized

A few days ago, I wrote a post, Great Cicero's Ghost. It was part of a discussion of legal ethics, causes, and conflicts of interest, arising from this post by Charles Thomas (which in turn arose from this post by Scott Greenfield).

The discussion continued with Max Kennerly's "thoughts" ("there's no requirement for the utmost zeal in representation, so we know that there's no absolute duty to make a particular argument just because it might confer some advantage on the client"), my response to Kennerly, Matthew Wright's view (to which I tried to respond, but failed because I'm stubborn about not signing in to wordpress.com to comment; I'll blog about it later). This is all in the best disputatious tradition of the practical blawgosphere. Bruce Godfrey commented too, in an annoyingly selfrighteous passive-aggressive happyspherical "I'm going to tell you what people said but I'm not going to link to them" way.

You see what I did there? I mentioned some interesting posts, and I linked to them-whether I agree with them or not-so that you could go read them yourself. That is the way the blawgosphere works. Charles and Scott and Max and Matthew and even Bruce get a little bit of "link love"; my readers who are interested in reading their whole posts have to go their blogs, where Charles and Scott and Max and Matthew and even Bruce have a chance of capturing those readers' attention with the other things that they have written. Writing is work, and I shouldn't deprive Charles or Scott or Max or Matthew or even Bruce of eyeballs on their own blogs.

That's not Steve Greenleaf's style. A self-styled "freelance lawyer," Greenleaf copies someone's entire blog post and republishes it on his blog with a paragraph or so of his own commentary above it. He does link to the original, which makes him a little better than those who copy others' blog posts and republish them without linking to the original.

This is not how the blawgosphere works. Reprinting someone else's content in its entirety is the wrong thing to do. Someone other than Greenleaf put work into every post that he copies; he has no right to steal that work by publishing it on his own site, either with attribution or without.