I wanted to chime in on the importing communities debate, but I don't feel like quoting all the relevant bits (oh, the pains of digest-mode). So, please forgive me if this is a bit disjointed.
Speaking (unofficially, of course) from the perspective of a LiveJournal Abuse Prevention Team member, the core problem with community imports is that the community maintainer who orders the import is not requesting their own content to be republished - it's content that belongs to other people, the users who individually posted the entries in the community. The LiveJournal TOS is crystal clear on the matter: section XIV, subsections 1 and 3 unequivocally state that the content posted to LiveJournal, via any method, remains the property of its author, and the author retains ALL rights thereto, including copyright. This includes community entries. Community maintainers do NOT have *any* rights to the content posted in the community other than entries they write themselves, beyond the ability to delete (or reject, for moderated comms) the content they don't want to have as a part of the comm, and the ability to delete/screen/freeze comments anywhere in the comm. They do not have the right to republish community entries written by others on another journaling service. Yes, the TOS also states that the content posted to LJ may be hosted in a variety of places, on third party servers, via RSS, etc., but the author still retains control over the content because they can delete it if they don't agree with how it's being used. Or, should they lose posting access to the community or end up deleting/purging their journal, they can ask the APT or LiveJournal staff, depending on the situation, to delete it for them, and we will do so, because it is *their* content. The loss of control over the content that has been posted is an overriding issue, and is honestly much more important than the maintainer's convenience in moving their community to DW. It's not just a "domain change", it's republishing it to a place where you as the original author no longer have control over it - you can't edit it, you can't delete it, you don't have any control over comments posted to it, etc. If DW were to allow community imports without any further technological improvements, the maintainer who performs the import is quite possibly in violation of copyright law by doing so, because they are causing the original author's content to be reposted in a venue which they did not originally authorize. (And yes, posting online meets the definition of publishing under copyright law.) If LJ ever wrote a journal importer (or implemented the one from the DW code), I can tell you right now that they would never allow community imports (at least, not if the APT has any say in the matter), for exactly this reason - it's a copyright nightmare. According to LiveJournal's interpretation of the DMCA, the APT would have to suspend any community entry so imported if and when the author of the entry files a copyright infringement notice. Comments are a gray-enough area as it is, but I think DW management and the development team have done a great job of trying to give the comment authors control over their comments. Unfortunately, the same solution (OpenID attribution) just won't work for community entries without a great deal of code work. --ryan (LJ teshiron) _______________________________________________ dw-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.dwscoalition.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dw-discuss
