Defending People

the tao of criminal-defense trial lawyering

Masad “Max” Baba, Roni Buff Greenberg, and Other Thieving Swine

[J]ust about any­thing you can imag­ine some­one being accused of, we’ve defended it.

-Me.

[J]ust about any­thing you can imag­ine some­one being accused of, we’ve defended it.

–Lawyer Masad “Max” Baba, here.

It seems every year penal­ties for dri­ving while intox­i­cated in Texas are becom­ing more severe. 

Max Baba. And me.

Mis­de­meanor cases are often given lit­tle atten­tion because there is not as much jail time attached as for felonies.

Me. And Max.

Max Baba stole his criminal-law-related con­tent whole­sale from me.

I filed a DMCA take­down notice on him; that page doesn’t turn up in Google results, but the take­down didn’t get Max Baba’s atten­tion. That’s a shame, really.

Thieving Swine Max Baba

Max isn’t the only one appro­pri­at­ing oth­ers’ con­tent for self-promotion with­out its cre­ators’ per­mis­sion. Today I got a ping­back on this post from the blog of Roni Buff Green­berg, who claims to be a divorce lawyer…some­where. The ping­back went back to this post:

Roni Buff Greenberg Screen Shot

That’s right: “if this con­tent is not in your news reader, the page you are view­ing infringes the copy­right.” Greenberg’s theft of my writ­ing for her own pro­mo­tional pur­poses goes back to May. I’m not the only one whose con­tent Green­berg is using, though. She repub­lishes as her own arti­cles from Legal Insur­rec­tion and Avvo’s Lawyer­nomics, among oth­ers; her site does not appear to have any orig­i­nal content.

(The man­ner of my dis­cov­ery of Roni Greenberg’s arro­ga­tion of my words gave me an idea: I’m chang­ing my ©Feed notice to include a link to this post. That way, if the infringer has ping­backs turned on I’ll get an email every time one of my posts is repub­lished with­out permission.)

Green­berg prob­a­bly thinks it’s okay—©Feed footer notwithstanding—to use my con­tent to pro­mote her web­site. Max Baba may have thought so too, before he got a take­down letter.

I got an email this week­end regard­ing Sparta Town­son from Cath­leen Lock­hart, a lawyer in San Antonio:

I am con­sid­er­ing hir­ing her to direct more traf­fic to my web-site.  I share an office with an attor­ney that uses her and has had a lot of busi­ness from the web.   How­ever, I came across your infor­ma­tion and was a lit­tle con­cerned.  I am not very web smart, and need some­one to edu­cate me.  I am w/ Lexis-Nexis and they really do not pro­duce much other than host­ing.  Any infor­ma­tion regard­ing Sparta, I would appre­ci­ate.  She is not cheap. Or, if you can rec­om­mend some­one.   Thank you for your pro­fes­sional courtesies. 

If what has been writ­ten about Sparta Town­son on the web (includ­ing this appel­late opin­ion uphold­ing a tem­po­rary injunc­tion pre­vent­ing her from com­mit­ting fur­ther defama­tion against a doc­tor) doesn’t dis­suade a lawyer from putting her rep­u­ta­tion in Townson’s hands, it’s only because that lawyer wants des­per­ately to believe in the char­la­tans who promise the fame and for­tune to be found on the Internet.

It will be inter­est­ing to see whether Lock­hart hires Town­son, and whether Town­son makes as much of Lockhart’s rep­u­ta­tion as she has of her own. While I write from time to time about web marketing—and have writ­ten about Sparta—it’s not my job to edu­cate lawyers about the sub­ject. The sub­ject is, in truth, not com­pli­cated: Be hon­est. Don’t steal. Cher­ish your rep­u­ta­tion. Be the kind of lawyer now that you want to be in fif­teen years. 

There is no magic pixie dust, on the web or off it.

Share

Tags:


This entry was posted by on Monday, August 13th, 2012 at 4:34 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

About The Author

Mark Bennett got his letter of marque from the Supreme Court of Texas in May 1995. He is famous for having no sense of humor when it comes to totalitarianism.

Comments

4 Responses to “Masad “Max” Baba, Roni Buff Greenberg, and Other Thieving Swine”

  1. Justin T. says:
    13 August 2012 at 5:11 pm

    One of the nice things about my blog is that it’s gen­er­ally too inane or non­sen­si­cal for con­tent thieves to bother steal­ing from me. Cer­tainly I don’t have to worry about other lawyers steal­ing my con­tent, as I doubt there are many lawyers who would want their name asso­ci­ated with the crap I write. I win, I guess? Heh.

    Reply
    • Mark Bennett says:
      13 August 2012 at 5:26 pm

      Look at the Lawyer­nomics and Legal Insur­rec­tion posts that Green­berg rips off, then try telling me your blog is too inane to steal from.

      Reply
      • Justin T. says:
        13 August 2012 at 6:11 pm

        Just did some search­ing on that.. wow, you weren’t kid­ding. I guess I should look out once I fin­ish my “A very Wu-Tang Christ­mas” post here soon. Mr. Baba should be well aware that the Wu-Tang Clan ain’t nothin’ to f*ck with.

        Reply
  2. Paul Walcutt says:
    17 August 2012 at 5:06 pm

    As those from the Shaolin slums also sug­gest, “you best pro­tect your neck.”

    Reply

Leave a non-anonymous Reply

«     »