Friday, January 19, 2007

Can you guys hear me now?

A response below, but do read the whine as we find it most entertaining.



Accept no imitations

Now, this is ridiculous: at the URL http://www.overlawyered.blogspot.com/ (no, I'm not going to give it a live link) someone or other has erected a pseudo-blog under the heading, "Overlawyered", followed by a verbatim swipe of the paragraph ("Overlawyered explores an American legal system...") which for years stood atop this site's sidebar and currently stands atop our "about us" page. The imitation-Overlawyered blog has relatively little content, but one of its entries (dated May 05, 2006) consists of excerpts swiped verbatim from a post of Ted's of Feb. 16, 2006 on this site about a South Texas legal case.

Other content on the pseudo-Overlawyered site suggests that the author(s) take an interest in the South Texas legal scene, and have established a large group of blogspot entities which blogroll each other under the banner of "Team Kenedeno" (more at http://teamkenedeno.blogspot.com/). These interlocking sites often sport not very accurate names such as corpuschristicallertimes.blogspot.com, microsoftdotcom.blogspot.com, and exxonmobile.blogspot.com, and at least one of them (at http://wattslawfirm.blogspot.com/) also contains a more extensive verbatim swipe from Ted's Feb. 16, 2006 post, mentioned above.

I looked around for a while, but failed to find any appropriate "report abuse" procedure on the Blogspot/Blogger site. The nearest thing was a "Flag Objectionable Content" button which apparently triggers a review for hate speech, obscenity, etc., but does not offer any way of reporting the rather different problem arising here. Reader suggestions are welcome.

Update from Ted: "We've contacted the appropriate people. Thanks for everyone's help."






Dear Ted,

The overlawyered.blogspot.com is a web address of which you do not control nor own. I tried to respond to an article on your overlawyered.com website

http://www.overlawyered.com/2006/02/el_defenzor_on_the_watts_law_f.html

The comment was never published after multiple attempts.

Thus MY CREATION........

www.overlawyered.blogspot.com

One comment made out of pure envy
El Defenzor, a Corpus Christi paper of questionable credibility, claims to have uncovered e-mails among the plaintiffs' bar in that town hand-picking judges for the bench at election time. Unfortunately, this germ of an interesting story is buried in bad punctuation and a deranged-sounding ungrammatical writing style that is consistent with what a commenter here calls "tinfoil hat-wearing."

Hey dude you poked your nose into our business and not the other way around. Now that you stuck it in, you claim you have no interest in South Texas Politics so go back where you came from but not without rebuke.

Then you spout off again as if you sit so high.

Imagine what a credible journalist could do with this story! Sixty Minutes? Houston Press? Dallas Observer? Corpus Christi Caller-Times? Texas Monthly? Anyone out there?
Be a man and take your spanking or not?

TTFN