Poll to see where we're coming from and where we're at

[pheret1]

I wanted to see who we all are and where we all stand regarding the entire Strikethrough and Boldthrough situation. What demographic is represented by fandom? Are people other than fans or RPGers actively upset? What issues do you want to call attention to most? Are they common issues

Comments

My own concerns

[codeman38]

Though I'm a reader of fanfic/fanart, I'm not so much of an active participant in the fandom community.

I am, however, a postgraduate-level computer science student.

And I'm worried that LJ will handle DMCA copyright claims the same way that they handled the fanart complaints- i.e., suspending an entire journal and all related journals for a single post, because of a copyright claim that was legally questionable in the first place. Given Six Apart's past record with fraudulent DMCA notices, I think I very well have a right to be worried.

Re: My own concerns

[buggery]

The scary thing about Abuse's handling of DMCA notices is that they clearly do not understand the law.

They are not *supposed* to take action on a notice which isn't properly filed, and that includes when the person sending the notice is not the copyright holder, as well as when the copyrighted material in question is not being used by the person accused in the notice. They seem to have conflated the fact that a hosting service which receives a takedown notice isn't allowed to make a determination as to whether an instance of copyrighted material being used falls under Fair Use (only a court can determine that) into the notion that they have to treat any notice they receive as valid, which simply isn't true.

And the way they mishandle the fraudulent DMCA notices they get just makes their three-strikes policy even more problematic -- they're counting accusations rather than findings of guilt as strikes.

[ex_drakyn]

I rarely post, but I comment and read a great deal more.

And, heh, I'm one of six guys on here. -.-;;

Incompetence and dishonesty

[amorettea]

6A is like a drunken, abusive, cheating boyfriend. They promise they will change and never do it again but then they do. I am smart enough and experienced enough (at age 50), to know that any corporation with contempt for their customer base will not prosper in the long run.

If they were honest and stopped all that nonsense about being "forced" to censor gay art and just admitted they were squicked by gay porn and would ban it, I wouldn't mind. It's their server and their rules. But passing the blame onto the "law" when it is obvious they know NOTHING about the law is just plain dishonest, not to say embarrassing.

Exactly!

[buggery]

::points at icon::

Re: Incompetence and dishonesty

[mythdefied]

The more BS I see from LJ, the more I'm coming to understand that you were right when this first started, that I should've jumped ship back then. I just wish the rest of my flist would leave, then I could delete this journal completely.

[nleseul]

To expand a bit on my answer above, the scariest thing I see at the moment is the fact that the abuse team doesn't seem to want to trust artists when they explicitly identify the characters in an image as over 18, and are still willing to give users a "strike" over an image thus identified if a character still looks under 18, in their subjective judgment.

Beyond the obvious difficulties this creates for fan art (given that many popular styles of art are based around young-seeming characters), I worry that they may eventually practice a similar lack of trust when looking at actual photographs. That is to say, if a user posts a nude picture of herself in a journal, has a birthdate in her profile that makes her over 18, but still looks underage in the eyes of an abuse team member, their apparent policy might lead them to disbelieve the stated age of the person and report them for photographic child pornography, with all that entails

[buggery]

I'm just waiting for someone to report this icon of mine.

Why, that male looks even younger than the way HP fanartists draw the Hogwarts boys! And touching the nipple -- nipples are sexual! (Just ask the nursing mothers' communities on LJ.) Child pornography!

...Except that it's a still from The Man Who Fell to Earth, and David Bowie was twenty-eight years old when that image of him was captured.

[anonymous]

[ex_uniquewo]

And you can edit polls after filling them out.

You can't edit them once they've been posted. People who answer the poll can edit their answers but the person who made the poll cannot edit their questions or the possible answers they've listed.