rho

So, this whole LJ versus fandom thing then?

For anyone who has somehow managed to miss all this, here's a very brief recap. An artist posted a picture of Severus Snape felating Harry Potter, for which his LiveJournal got permanently suspended. This then led to wank, drama, drama, wank, and more drama.

Firstly, the picture itself: I haven't actually seen it, but from what I've heard of it, I doubt I'd have a problem with it. I can't see how particularly hurts anyone, so even though I have no interest in such pictures, I'd happily let it stand on the grounds of free speech.

Of course, LiveJournal isn't governed by my moral principles; it's governed by the laws of the USA and the state of California. And they say that child porn is anything that:

(A) depicts an image that is, or appears to be, of a minor engaging in graphic bestiality, sadistic or masochistic abuse, or sexual intercourse, including genital-genital, oral-genital, anal-genital, or oral-anal, whether between persons of the same or opposite sex; and
(B) lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value

Now I'm certainly no lawyer, but based on my reading, I'd say that the picture in question is, at best, legally ambiguous. I don't know what would happen if this particular case was brought to trial. Possibly it would be determined that Harry Potter in the image did not appear to be a minor. Possibly it would be determined that the picture had serious artistic value. Or possibly not.

With this in mind, I certainly can't fault LJ in their decision to suspend the account. Protecting people's rights to post morally- and legally-ambiguous pictures of Snarry porn (which is also probably a copyright violation, remember) does not seem worth risking a potentially nasty lawsuit over to me.

(See also this post from synecdochic who is far more informed about the legalities than I could ever hope to be.)

(As an aside, I don't think it's a good law. However, I do have some sympathy with the legislators here. I can't imagine that writing laws could be easy. There are always going to be grey areas with any law. And what if the same bit of wording that could catch this bit of cross-generational Harry Potter slash art also catches something else which could actually lead to actual sexual abuse of an actual child? I'm fairly sure I wouldn't be able to write a law that could unambiguously catch anything "bad" while leaving anything "good" untouched.)

That said, though, I don't think that LiveJournal/Six Apart have handled this issue particularly well. The communication hasn't been good, and a lot of the policies aren't coming across as particularly clear. I can certainly understand why people are upset, and why people are fearful that they might be next, even if they don't think they've done anything wrong.

However, it does seem to be turning, in part, into a bit of a witch-hunt. There seem to be elements from within fandom who are eager to find fault in everything that LJ does or says. People doing big write-in campaigns and then complaining when they receive form answers, for instance, is particularly silly. Of course LJ are doing some things wrong, but equally of course they're doing some things right. Many people are just looking as hard as possible for the bad and ignoring the good at the moment. (here's someone trying to focus on the positive.)

I also particularly dislike the slippery slope arguments that people are using, saying that while it may just be porn involving pictures of children now, possibly it will be $other_thing next! Slippery slope arguments are dangerous, people. If you start using slippery slope arguments, then before you know it you'l be errecting straw-men and making ad hominem attacks!

However, some people have been compelled to move from LiveJournal, and I don't have a problem with that. I'd never want to stop people from making a stand for what they believe or from leaving somewhere they were no longer comfortable with. The one thing that I absolutely cannot fathom, though, is why people seem to think that moving to GreatestJournal (GJ) is a good idea. For starters, GJ is also hosted in the USA and is therefore subject to the same laws. Do people really think that GJ would make a stand to protect Harry Potter porn? Do people really think that the same forces that have led LJ to things like theses suspensions and display of ads and so on wouldn't be equally as prevalent on GJ? Plus, GJ hardly has a stellar record as it is. For starters, there's the way they violated LJ's copyright by lifting the dystopia site scheme and LJ's FAQ wholesale; that is, using parts of LJ that were quite explicitly not licensed as free software. Then there was the big database SNAFU they had a while ago where they accidentally managed to make their entire database of usernames/passwords publicly visible. To put it bluntly, I think that GreatestJournal sucks, and that moving there is barmy.

What it really comes down to, though, is this: when hosting your content, you can have either the convenience of a big site, with the centralisation, and the social networking, or you can have the security of hosting your own stuff and being in (near-) total control. You cannot, at the present time, have both.

Sure, there are things like OpenID (add that to the list of good things that LJ have done) and RSS syndication, but they aren't there yet. If everyone moved off to their own servers, then sure, they could emulate LJ's friends page with RSS, and they could emulates LJ's security settings with openID, but it would be a pain. LJ works not because it's a blogging engine, or because it's a social networking tool, or because it's an aggregator; it works because it's all of these at once. Having someone else dictating what is and is not acceptable content is one of the trade offs you have to pay here.

Now, personally, I'm hoping that RSS, openID et al are going to take strides forward in the next few years, so that I can, for instance, add somebody's blogger blog to my LJ friends list as easily as I can add another LJ user. When we get to that point we'll properly be able to have a more distributed social network, rather than a centralised one, which I think will be a Good Thing. (It is worth noting, however, that LJ is (with the exception of friends-locked entries, etc.) nice and open, as opposed to the walled gardens of Facebook and the likes.)

Which brings me onto another point: this old(ish) post by insomnia where he claims that LJ is dying. While I typically take anything that Insomnia has to say about LJ with a truckful of salt due to his past enmity with the company, I've no particular reason to doubt his statistics here. Is LJ going to be around forever? Of course not. Is it going to be around in anything like it's current form in 5 years? I've no idea. This is the web, for Pete's sake. On the web, 5 years is a long time. It's also worth noting that the web itself was born in August '91, with LiveJournal coming into being in March '99. LiveJournal is old. It's been around for over half the lifetime of the web already!

Regardless of how many people are leaving in there here and now, I think that treating LiveJournal like a sinking ship is premature. Sure, it's not going to be around forever, but I don't expect it to be. It's going to be around for the foreseeable future, and that's good enough for me. When I start seeing any signs that it's going to collapse imminently, or that it's going to start suspending people entirely without reason, then I'll start thinking about moving. For now, though, I'm staying firmly put.