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Law reviews citing blogs: good thing or bad thing?

By Lawrence B. Ebert, Esq.

Further to an IPBiz post [Do law schools promote a culture of copying?] and related to an ezine article Internet Publishing: Online Today, But What About Tomorrow Or Where Have You Gone, 406,302? :

one IPBiz reader wrote:

per law review citations to blogs:

A) Don't you think citing to blogs is dangerous, given they can
disappear from the web?? In a sense, a blog is a single volume of a
work at ONE library. If that library says "we don't want to shelve
this
anymore", the volume can disappear. HOWEVER, in the case of most law
reviews, I'll bet there is more than one copy, at more than one
institution-so it is difficult to lose the information. With a blog,
all can disappear in an instance (fire, computer crash, ....) even
without blogmaster intentions.

I'm willing to give citations to the web, if I am teaching a topic, but

I'd never cite such for a journal publication.

B) A) is an example of unintended consequences. Having information
at
your fingertips on line, means one never had to go to the library...so
libraries have less demand to subscribe to paper journals, they move to

"on line journals" and Lexis/Nexus. The library now has "the past",
and
the "current" is in a much more insecure, not-long-lasting, volatile
media.

Likewise, plagiarism is an unintended consequence of "copy-and-paste"
capability.

Separately, IPBiz notes another way of measuring significance might be
to count the number of times an article is copied on the web. Further,
extra points should be given when the copyist removes the original
author's name and substitutes his own.

Full post as published by IPBiz on February 25, 2008 (boomark / email).