Copying my work is OK – up to a point

From time to time, people ask if they may republish my articles; sometimes they simply go ahead and copy them without asking. I am usually relaxed about this – although most of my work involves writing, that is not what I am paid for; the job is to spread the word about e-disclosure / ediscovery as widely as possible, and that objective is best served by wide republication of what I write. I ask only that I am credited with it, and that anything of mine which is quoted, whether the whole or any part of an article, appears exactly as I wrote it – I am not tolerant of people “improving” my prose.

I do not have a Google Alert set up for my name (although perhaps I will from now on), but I do have one for “e-disclosure”. An alert turned up this morning with a text extract which looked familiar, although the heading and website address did not. It turned out to be an article copied from my website or, rather, an article made up of passages cobbled together from various articles on my website. So far as I can tell, most of the extracts have been reasonably faithfully copied, although there is at least one passage which I do not recognise.

The e-disclosure practice direction and electronic documents questionnaire in tangible form

Since I have been banging on about the “proposed” or “pending” edisclosure practice direction for months now, it is not surprising that everyone seemed to think that I would be the first to know when it had been formally published. I was nine days late in reporting its publication by the Ministry of Justice and, even then, did not point to a source for the official version.

To judge from the messages I have had since, some of you felt that this was as if King Aegeus had somehow failed to spot the sails of Theseus’s ship despite his long vigil on the Cape of Sounian.  One correspondent was “surprised” and another “amused” that the news had reached me via Twitter, as if I should  have been watching the MoJ web site night and day; perhaps they think that the Master of the Rolls would telephone me personally when the final signature landed on the parchment or whatever they print Statutory Instruments on these days.

The reality is that helping to draft these things gives you no special status when it comes to tracking their progress; indeed, like Aegeus, I did not know whether to expect black sails or white ones, which is why I said nothing concrete about the PD until I saw an announcement in official form (if you are lost by all this stuff about Greeks on cliffs and monochrome sails, by the way, Plutarch’s Theseus is a good read).

ILTA 2010 in Las Vegas: Strategic Unity, Defensibility and the Cloud

ILTA is the International Legal Technology Association. I am now back from ILTA 2010 Strategic Unity in Las Vegas, which was as busy and as good as ever. The red hot bloggers and tweeters were reporting on events as they happened. As usual, I prefer to wait and see what I can still remember a few days later, and to write about what interests me rather than what is seen objectively as important. My background post What happens in Las Vegas matters in the UK was a play on the old saying that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. These days, what happens in Vegas stands a good chance of being on FaceBook or Twitter in minutes, and the nearest I came to vice involved a new taste for cocktails, and cheesecake for breakfast (not, as my first draft had it, “cocktails and cheesecake for breakfast”, which just goes to show the importance of proper punctuation).

This avoidance of vice owed nothing to innate virtue. Between the educational sessions, the formal meetings, the social events and the random rencontres, there was no time for the more traditional Vegas pursuits of gambling, shopping, spur-of-the-moment marriage and energetic physical interaction with broad-minded fellow-delegates. I must improve my time-management next time.