Fandom Goes Kablooey!

[aprilstarchild]

So, near as I can tell, this is what's happening:

Some idiots noticed kinky fanfiction (gasp! some of it's non-consensual! some of it has minors! horror! because obviously, reading about Something You Shouldn't Do is the same as doing it!), and confused it with real pedophilia etc.
Said idiots contacted LJ and Six Apart and threw a fit.
LJ has deleted an assload of slash fanfic communities (including pornish_pixies which has been around forever and a day) and a bunch of individual journals, without warning, because they had interests like "chan" and "non-con" and such. Hundreds of journals have been deleted--some, idiotically enough, of survivors of incest etc., who do have the word "incest" listed in their interests.
They even deleted a comm based on discussing the book Lolita.

Lest you take my word alone for it....

Gaaah. It's such bullshit. It's also got 2/3rds of fandom scared apeshit. A lot of them have deleted the "questionable" stuff from their interests and replaced it with things like "free speech." hpslash temporarily deleted their own comm until it's resolved or blows over, because when LJ suspends an account you can lose everything on it--so some people have seen years' worth of their fanfiction writing disappear.

Comments

[ourglasslake.livejournal.com]

Two things:
There was at least some degree of warning, because I got the message from two different fandom sources to make sure my interests were clear earlier this weekend.

&

http://shiv5468.livejournal.com/340472.html
She's a lawyer who's also huge in the SS/HG fandom, and here's her take. It sucks, but it makes a lot of sense.

[aprilstarchild.livejournal.com]

*nod*

emmagrant01 keeps mentioning something called FanLib, do you know what she's talking about?

[ourglasslake.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's a for-profit site in the vein of fanfiction.net. But the whole for-profit thing is very dodgy, and worrying a lot of fans. JKR has been kind about the explosion of fandom around her work, but if people start making money off of it, she may not have a choice but to start cracking down.

So, what I'm wondering is, is this just fandom-related? Because I did a LJ interests search on some of these "no-no" words earlier and there were still plenty of users with them, even with some really dodgy interests I didn't even feel comfortable typing out. I'd like to know exactly which journals were suspended -- have you heard of a list somewhere?

[aprilstarchild.livejournal.com]

There is indeed a list (nice icon change, ha), but I don't know where it is--I've just seen references to it. But last I heard no one knew how many of them were just deleted by their owners.

I also read somewhere in a post by one of the lj abuse volunteers that someone has to point out a tos violation before they can suspend an account--in other words, it's the vigilant weirdoes (I don't remember the name of their group atm) that's causing all the problems. They're making this list of livejournals with those interests listed.

The whole thing is just fucked up. I feel bad for people who have lost years of fiction.

[ourglasslake.livejournal.com]

They haven't lost it, though; I've seen the official emails from LJ and they give people ways to get their old posts. The one thing they've done right in this debacle!

[ourglasslake.livejournal.com]

Ah, here we go:

http://catrinella.livejournal.com/151812.html
http://jamoche.livejournal.com/29516.html

[aprilstarchild.livejournal.com]

Wow, that first one is a good source. Very balanced.

I don't know if I have anything truly questionable in my profile, I'm checking anyway. Ugh.

Legal Ramifications of Parody/Fan Fic

[aeonflux1973.livejournal.com]

There is a book that was published that the same type of thing happened to. The book is called "The Wind Done Gone"

from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wind_Done_Gone

The estate of Margaret Mitchell, controlled by her descendants, sued Randall and her publishing company, Houghton Mifflin, on the grounds that The Wind Done Gone was too similar to Gone with the Wind, thus infringing its copyright. The case attracted numerous comments from leading scholars, authors, and activists, regarding what Mitchell's attitudes would have been, and how much The Wind Done Gone copies from its predecessor. After the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit vacated an injunction against publishing the book in Suntrust v. Houghton Mifflin (2001), the case was settled in 2002 when Houghton Mifflin agreed to make an unspecified donation to Morehouse College, a historically African American college in Atlanta, Georgia in exchange for Mitchell's estate dropping the litigation.

The cover of the book bears a seal identifying it as "The Unauthorized Parody." It is parody in the broad legal sense: a work that comments or criticizes a prior work. This characterization was important in the Suntrust case. However, the book is not a comedy, as the term "parody" would imply in its common usage.

Re: Legal Ramifications of Parody/Fan Fic

[aprilstarchild.livejournal.com]

The issue isn't the legality of fanfiction in general, it's that the stories include things that would be illegal in real life--teachers and student relationships, for example. There's a group doing interests search on LJ for words like "incest" and reporting the journals to the volunteer LJ Abuse Team, and they're required to suspend those accounts without taking anything else into account.

The link that ourglasslake gave is a good one, in terms of talking about the legality issues that LJ is dealing with vs. the fans.