Sorry.  We got distracted.  You know.  New Year.  Blizzards.  Snowmageddon.  In any case we’re back and we’ll try to do better.

So here’s our latest “what the [ ] were they thinking?” news item.

It starts with this.  If you steal someone’s web site, try changing something … like maybe the words or the pictures.

Something more than the address and the name of the company.

Oh, and if you insist on copying a web site and relabeling everything as your own, please DO NOT do this to a law firm.  You might get sued.

This is the story of John Doe and a British law firm Maslin Associates.  Seems they needed a web site.  So they looked around, and copied the web site of Palm Beach law firm Gordon & Doner, a Palm Beach law firm.

According to the story in Law.com:

Highlights of a Palm Beach Gardens law firm’s Web site were bizarrely copied by someone posing as a British law firm while using the same text, design, logo and even photographs of the Florida attorneys.  Gordon & Doner, a personal injury firm, sued GoDaddy.com, the Web host for the copied site, and the unknown copier as John Doe after an attorney at the firm did a Google search for his own name and stumbled on maslinassociates.com, purportedly the site of a firm in Manchester, England.  Names were changed on the copy, and minor tweaks were inserted in the text to take out a home page reference to West Palm Beach and change dollars to pounds. But everything — from a list of Gordon & Doner’s courtroom victories to photos of staffers participating in a charity run — were copies of the Gordon & Doner site fortheinjured.com.

“It’s really strange,” said Adam Doner, whose photo appeared on the copied site and was identified as Evans Maslin.

According to the law firm, GoDaddy.com was cooperating … “after we sued them.”

Hell hath no fury than a lawyer with cause.  According to a report in LegalMatch:

The law firm’s request for an injunction and damages from the defendants includes “a report detailing all of their activities in connection with the creation, revisions to, registration and hosting of the offending Web site, remedial advertising, actual damage, attorney fees, costs and punitive damages.”  Translation: they want anything and everything they can plead!