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About the latest LJ kerfluffle...
I didn't really think I had a whole lot to say about the latest LJ/6 Apart thing, but I keep finding myself commenting on other discussions in more and more detail, so I guess I'll just distill it here.
First off, there's a really fantastic post on the topic here, addressing the real-world political, moral and legal climate in which most of us operate when we're not online, and another good post here which is kind of a response to it.
I do think that LJ/6A made a mistake by deleting journals without giving the users a chance to remove the offending material, or to archive their stuff and delete the journal themselves. I don't think they were necessarily acting improperly or outside their rights as a business, but I really hate it when businesses deal that way with me, and I can see why someone would be upset about that. If I'm one day late with my utility payment and my electric company shuts me off, that'd piss me off. I can't deny that the electric company has every right to do it and (in the above example) I couldn't even deny that I was violating the terms of my agreement with them, but I can still be annoyed and upset that I wasn't given a chance to fix my mistakes first.
I'm seeing fandom doing a whole lot of the former and not so much of the latter. Getting ticked at LJ/6A for being a bit knee-jerky with journal deletions and still not having a good, clear process for appeals ... yeah, I can get behind that. Decrying LJ/6A for not being willing to risk fines, court cases and jail time to defend someone else's underage porn? WTF is wrong with people? And yes, in the case of the latest, I know the author says they're not underage in the picture -- sorry, can't find a link for that at the moment, but try looking through the links at![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
metafandom because I KNOW I've seen it a few times. And you know what? If they're underage in canon, if they look underage in the picture or at least reasonably could be, I don't think it's at ALL unreasonable for people to assume that they are. If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and it's always been a duck, "but it's only dressed up like a duck!" is not a good defense. It's the artist's responsibility to prove that it's not, not the viewer's responsibility to realize that it's not, or the responsibility of those providing the venue to take the heat for the artist's creative decisions. (And by "the artist's responsibility" I don't mean that an artist, or a writer, HAS to conform to society's mores in their work -- of course not. But understanding that your work has real-world consequences and taking responsibility for them -- that's something we all ought to do, always.)
Similarly, even though I'm 31, I don't object when I'm carded at the liquor store. The employees don't want to get in trouble; if my illegal and/or ill-considered actions might hurt someone else, the burden of proof that I'm acting legally and properly is, and should be, on me. Personally, I think that setting the drinking age at 21 when a person gets most of their other adult privileges and responsibilities at 16 or 18 is idiotic -- but even though I think the law is a stupid law, I'm still totally responsible if I buy liquor for underage kids and go to jail for it. The liquor store and its employees should not be held responsible for my actions (which has happened, OFTEN ... selling to minors is a CRIME), and they are perfectly within their rights to do whatever they have to do in order to protect themselves from ME choosing to protest what I believe are unequal and/or unjust drinking laws.
You don't have to believe that something should exist in order to acknowledge that it does exist and can affect you. Do I want to live in a world where the laws and social mores of my country are dictated by the WASP middle class? Of course not. But I do live in that world, and I have to make my decisions based on that.
Whether or not drawings of underage sexual activity are technically illegal, as opposed to photographs which most definitely are -- this keeps getting brought up in various discussions, and IMHO, it's a total straw man. I mean, from a moral and legal standpoint, OF COURSE it matters (and I have my own opinions on it), but as far as a drawing of underage sex getting 6 Apart in trouble ... it doesn't HAVE to be illegal, it only has to LOOK like it is to a cop, judge, soccer mom, Warner Brothers exec, or self-appointed LJ vigilante. And "obscenity" is a muddy, state-by-state mess of contradictory laws that can be used to support damn near any kind of stupid lawsuit.
Being willing to go to jail to defend my rights is admirable (and, frankly, requires a level of moral fortitude that I don't think I have). Expecting someone else to risk their business, their money or their freedom to defend my rights, and insulting them for not being willing to do so -- that, my friends, is complete and total asshattery. Believe me, I understand being upset at being treated shoddily by a large business, I understand and applaud the urge to support free speech ... but what I'm seeing in a lot of these discussions is a sense of (god I hate this phrase, because I've all too often seen it used as a slur against fanfic writers, but in some cases it really does apply) fannish entitlement that is really disturbing to me. LJ/6A hasn't necessarily done a very good job of fairly and consistently enforcing its rules, nor (apparently) of conveying those rules to its users in a clear and understandable way, but you know what -- when it comes to the content we store on their servers, they don't owe us a damn thing. The burden for making sure that our content is legal and conforms to the terms of their TOS falls on us, not them, and they have every right to kick us out if they catch us in the act of doing something that could get them in trouble.
(And while I'm being all ranty, who in their right mind creates a community calledinnocence_jihad to defend creators of (allegedly) underage porn who've had their journals deleted? I'm the last person in the world to go all PC on someone's ass, but I'm truly boggled here ... how in the WORLD can a person lose that much perspective?)
Having gotten all THAT off my chest ... even though I'm not planning on leaving LJ (at least not at the moment, and probably not in the future either), I did try LJ Book, a cross-platform backup feature that converts your journal into a PDF. It took about five minutes to convert my whole![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
friendshipper journal into a cleanly formatted and printable, book-style, 8-Mb PDF. The biggest problem I'm seeing at this point is that it doesn't seem to pick up paragraph breaks in comments -- the actual journal entries are fine, but comments come out as a long undifferentiated block of text; not THAT much of a problem, but for someone like me with a habit of writing long comments, it can make discussions a bit hard to follow. Generally though, it seems to be a nice tool and I like it. (If you select a very narrow range of dates, you could also use it to get your fic formatted quickly and easily into a printable PDF. And if you have the full version of Acrobat, you can create your own custom title pages or illustrations and add them to the existing document ... but that's probably a bit much. *g*)
First off, there's a really fantastic post on the topic here, addressing the real-world political, moral and legal climate in which most of us operate when we're not online, and another good post here which is kind of a response to it.
I do think that LJ/6A made a mistake by deleting journals without giving the users a chance to remove the offending material, or to archive their stuff and delete the journal themselves. I don't think they were necessarily acting improperly or outside their rights as a business, but I really hate it when businesses deal that way with me, and I can see why someone would be upset about that. If I'm one day late with my utility payment and my electric company shuts me off, that'd piss me off. I can't deny that the electric company has every right to do it and (in the above example) I couldn't even deny that I was violating the terms of my agreement with them, but I can still be annoyed and upset that I wasn't given a chance to fix my mistakes first.
I'm seeing fandom doing a whole lot of the former and not so much of the latter. Getting ticked at LJ/6A for being a bit knee-jerky with journal deletions and still not having a good, clear process for appeals ... yeah, I can get behind that. Decrying LJ/6A for not being willing to risk fines, court cases and jail time to defend someone else's underage porn? WTF is wrong with people? And yes, in the case of the latest, I know the author says they're not underage in the picture -- sorry, can't find a link for that at the moment, but try looking through the links at
metafandom because I KNOW I've seen it a few times. And you know what? If they're underage in canon, if they look underage in the picture or at least reasonably could be, I don't think it's at ALL unreasonable for people to assume that they are. If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and it's always been a duck, "but it's only dressed up like a duck!" is not a good defense. It's the artist's responsibility to prove that it's not, not the viewer's responsibility to realize that it's not, or the responsibility of those providing the venue to take the heat for the artist's creative decisions. (And by "the artist's responsibility" I don't mean that an artist, or a writer, HAS to conform to society's mores in their work -- of course not. But understanding that your work has real-world consequences and taking responsibility for them -- that's something we all ought to do, always.)Similarly, even though I'm 31, I don't object when I'm carded at the liquor store. The employees don't want to get in trouble; if my illegal and/or ill-considered actions might hurt someone else, the burden of proof that I'm acting legally and properly is, and should be, on me. Personally, I think that setting the drinking age at 21 when a person gets most of their other adult privileges and responsibilities at 16 or 18 is idiotic -- but even though I think the law is a stupid law, I'm still totally responsible if I buy liquor for underage kids and go to jail for it. The liquor store and its employees should not be held responsible for my actions (which has happened, OFTEN ... selling to minors is a CRIME), and they are perfectly within their rights to do whatever they have to do in order to protect themselves from ME choosing to protest what I believe are unequal and/or unjust drinking laws.
You don't have to believe that something should exist in order to acknowledge that it does exist and can affect you. Do I want to live in a world where the laws and social mores of my country are dictated by the WASP middle class? Of course not. But I do live in that world, and I have to make my decisions based on that.
Whether or not drawings of underage sexual activity are technically illegal, as opposed to photographs which most definitely are -- this keeps getting brought up in various discussions, and IMHO, it's a total straw man. I mean, from a moral and legal standpoint, OF COURSE it matters (and I have my own opinions on it), but as far as a drawing of underage sex getting 6 Apart in trouble ... it doesn't HAVE to be illegal, it only has to LOOK like it is to a cop, judge, soccer mom, Warner Brothers exec, or self-appointed LJ vigilante. And "obscenity" is a muddy, state-by-state mess of contradictory laws that can be used to support damn near any kind of stupid lawsuit.
Being willing to go to jail to defend my rights is admirable (and, frankly, requires a level of moral fortitude that I don't think I have). Expecting someone else to risk their business, their money or their freedom to defend my rights, and insulting them for not being willing to do so -- that, my friends, is complete and total asshattery. Believe me, I understand being upset at being treated shoddily by a large business, I understand and applaud the urge to support free speech ... but what I'm seeing in a lot of these discussions is a sense of (god I hate this phrase, because I've all too often seen it used as a slur against fanfic writers, but in some cases it really does apply) fannish entitlement that is really disturbing to me. LJ/6A hasn't necessarily done a very good job of fairly and consistently enforcing its rules, nor (apparently) of conveying those rules to its users in a clear and understandable way, but you know what -- when it comes to the content we store on their servers, they don't owe us a damn thing. The burden for making sure that our content is legal and conforms to the terms of their TOS falls on us, not them, and they have every right to kick us out if they catch us in the act of doing something that could get them in trouble.
(And while I'm being all ranty, who in their right mind creates a community called
innocence_jihad to defend creators of (allegedly) underage porn who've had their journals deleted? I'm the last person in the world to go all PC on someone's ass, but I'm truly boggled here ... how in the WORLD can a person lose that much perspective?)Having gotten all THAT off my chest ... even though I'm not planning on leaving LJ (at least not at the moment, and probably not in the future either), I did try LJ Book, a cross-platform backup feature that converts your journal into a PDF. It took about five minutes to convert my whole
friendshipper journal into a cleanly formatted and printable, book-style, 8-Mb PDF. The biggest problem I'm seeing at this point is that it doesn't seem to pick up paragraph breaks in comments -- the actual journal entries are fine, but comments come out as a long undifferentiated block of text; not THAT much of a problem, but for someone like me with a habit of writing long comments, it can make discussions a bit hard to follow. Generally though, it seems to be a nice tool and I like it. (If you select a very narrow range of dates, you could also use it to get your fic formatted quickly and easily into a printable PDF. And if you have the full version of Acrobat, you can create your own custom title pages or illustrations and add them to the existing document ... but that's probably a bit much. *g*)