Whistling in the Dark

in this case the people who get hurt have nobody to blame but themselves.

Unless the blast radius is large enough to encompass unrelated-but-similar-looking-to-the-layman fan communities that are doing nothing wrong.

It's not about the porn. But if LJ is going to take away the porn because it's harming the children, then they should take away the child abuse, hate and pro ana/mia communities as well.

If they're going to police one harmful thing, then they should police them all.

No, I understand that just fine. And it's entirely possible that this will end up going to court as a result.

And this "test case" might get the deleted person's permanent account money back. But it will also become a wonderfully high profile case about what will be seen -- fair or not -- as depictions of underage sex using Scholastic's intellectual property to do it and the fandom that defends it.

If you honestly think any court action whatsoever -- regardless of what it's about and who wins -- doesn't end with a majorly revised TOS, with more fandom communities and lots else being banned, and with some people ending up having to defend their fanfic in some of those selfsame courts of law? Well, we'll have to have a followup conversation on the far end of all of this.

Finally, since the Permanent Accounts went on sale after the April Revision of the terms of service, and the April Revision includes:

You agree that LiveJournal, in its sole discretion, may terminate your password, journal, or account, and remove and discard any content within the Service, for any reason, including and without limitation, the lack of use, or if LiveJournal believes that you have violated or acted inconsistently with the letter or spirit of the TOS. Any contracts, verbal or written or assumed, in conjunction with your deleted journal and all its parts, at LiveJournal's discretion, will be terminated as well. LiveJournal may also, in its sole discretion and at any time, discontinue providing the Service, or any part thereof, with or without notice. You agree that any termination of your access to the Service under any provision of this TOS may be effected without prior notice, and acknowledge and agree that LiveJournal may immediately deactivate or delete your LiveJournal journal and all related information and files. LiveJournal reserves the right to bar any further access to such files or the Service. You agree that LiveJournal shall not be liable to you or any third-party for any termination of your access to the Service. Paid accounts that are terminated will not be refunded.

And that it also includes:

You agree to NOT use the Service to:

1. Upload, post or otherwise transmit any Content that is unlawful, harmful, threatening, abusive, harassing, tortious, defamatory, vulgar, obscene, libelous, invasive to another's privacy (up to, but not excluding any address, email, phone number, or any other contact information without the written consent of the owner of such information), hateful, or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable;

That's the ball game. Hell, the phrase 'otherwise objectionable' alone is the ball game. Put another way: 'if we think it's illegal or we think it's objectionable, we can take it down and not give you your money back, without warning.'

Put another way? They own the field, and they say who's playing on it.

(They also include:

# Upload, post or otherwise transmit any Content that infringes any patent, trademark, trade secret, copyright, or other proprietary rights of any party;

which means yes, they can delete copyright infringing accounts whenever they damn well feel like it. Without warning. Without refund.

All of this long long long predated the Permanent Accounts.

And all of it, in the end, is secondary to the potential damage that forcing test cases in the area of copyright infringement -- and forcing a judge to decide if a given Yaoi depiction really does depict eighteen year olds or not -- will inflict upon the community at large. Because Jerry Brown is a politician. A cool politician, but a politician nonetheless. And even if he facilitates the suspended users getting refunds? He's going to balance it with something that looks and sounds good to the constituency and doesn't make it sound like he's siding with pedophiles.

And that's going to make Strikethrough look positively cheerful in comparison.

Completely agreed. And it was clear and obvious this was coming down the pike after Strikethrough, so people who did this sort of thing and elected to stay (and for God's sake, bought a permanent account?) after it were planting crops on Vesuvius after it started smoking. There's only so sympathetic I can be in that situation.

Does all this suck? Sure, because LJ was pretty cool and sometime -- sooner than we like -- it's going to become a shadow of its former self.

Getting the State AG involved? Knocked at least six months off the time before we get to that point.

Then characterizing the issue as "getting the California State Attorney General's office involved because you're angry that SixApart deleted things they claim are in violation of their terms of service" was inviting misunderstanding.

Except this is why they got the AG's office involved.

Their justification is "they violated their agreement.

Their motivation is "they attacked us! They took down one of ours! They are waging a war against fandom and we have to take it back to them!"

They aren't pissed off that the deleted users didn't get their money back, any more than they're really pissed off that the ProAna communities exist. They're pissed off because the implicit statement that 6A has made is "it's wrong to depict Harry Potter and Snape having explicit gay sex," and when they claimed First Amendment rights they were laughed out of the communities they were in.

My point was, is, and remains twofold:

1) Well duh. You knew they were going to do this. They said they were going to do this. They claimed Strikethrough was a failure of methodology, not intention. That should have been a red flag and I'm sorry some people didn't get the message.

2) Getting pissed off, finding something to harp on to vent your spleen, and involving the State Attorney General, when your hobby involves at best a legal grey area, is staggeringly stupid and will lead to repercussions that could potentially extend far beyond Livejournal. Good show! Nice one! Whoo hoo!

To say they did this for any reason other than being pissed off because LJ deleted accounts against "the wishes of Fandom" is to be disingenuous.

(All that said? 6A should have just given them their money back. Yeah, they maybe didn't have to? But 6A didn't want this scrutiny any more than the fandom did. Everyone involved blew their practicality rolls.)

"think LJ's new policies are stupid, that they're mincing words about "legality" when what they really want to get rid is stuff that squicks the public-at-large"
And I totally support them doing that, so long as they're honest and they say "Look guys, we don't want this on our servers." Instead of hiding behind non-existent laws protecting equally non-existent minors having non-existent sex (or being in non-existent sexual situations).

And if they want to get rid of what upsets the public at large, they should get rid of the child abuse, pro ana/mia and pro hate communities as well. Since those *really* are in very clear violation of the ToS.

I think you're right, that's what it's about, and 6A do appear to have broken CA law, according to the interpretations I've seen.

However, doing this in this case will a) get publicity to the whole issue and b) make legal people with public service remits look at the specific details.

Even if 6A has a case to answer, fandom really doesn't want the legal spotlight shinging at them; to carefully test the waters would be one thing, but this complainant appears to have jumped in feet first and is only now realising there may be an issue regarding knock-on effects.

I think I'll be running LJ archive next few days, just to be sure.

ETA : Trying to protect *real* minors from starving themselves, or being raped, mutilated or molested, is not (asinine).

I'm just trying to point out that while they're banning people for having fictional minors (who are at *least* 17) have sex, there are *real* minors that are having problems *right now*. Problems like getting tips and hints and support on how to starve themselves, getting tips on purging. Parents are supporting other parents for feeding newborns every 5 hours (and letting them sleep between that time), hate communities are going on about how such and such race is lower than such and such race and on and on and on.

I'm just saying, that if LJ really wants to get rid of the stuff that causes harm, they should start with the stuff that's *really* harmful, and *then* make their way to the fanart/fanfiction. They shouldn't *start* with the fanart/fanfiction.

Not to mention, that by suspending accounts and *then* reporting them (assuming 6A even reported them in the first place), seems suspiciously to me like deleting evidence.

To my knowledge -- and I admit I may be wrong -- the archive tools still work on suspended accounts. So anything in them can still be retrieved by the people in question.

As for:

And we're mostly just pissed that LJ allows communities that *blatently* and *clearly* defy their ToS, while deleting communities that are in the gray area of the ToS.

I understand. I really do. It can be frustrating as Hell.

But you need to understand that to the people outside of this, this comes across as you not actually having a case to make. "There's way worse than us" is a bad tactic at best, disingenuous at worst.

Do I wish 6A had not done any of this? Yeah, I do. Do I think they're idiots for shooting themselves in the foot repeatedly when they're losing their userbase to MySpace, Facebook and others, and should be working to be the good alternative? Damn straight.

But for whatever dumb reason? They don't want fanfic any more. They're making that clear. I'm sorry for it but it's the truth, and being angry at what seems like inconsistent or even asinine choices on their part won't change that fact.

The simple truth is, it's time the fanfic community finds friendlier spaces to do what it does. And that makes me sad, because a number of fanficcers are people whose journal I follow and who I consider friends, and I don't want those people to put their focus elsewhere. It diminishes my completely non-fanficish experience.

But it's what's going to have to be, so I'm going to have to get over it. It's 6A's ballpark, and they're being stupid about it, so there we are.