That is a fantastic source of information and clears up several "gray areas"
for me as a mod. It makes sense and puts to rest the idea of importing comms
wholesale.

Alas, one of the reasons I was so keen on migration is that I don't trust LJ
with my content, or the content of the comms I mod. I do backups, yes, but
then what? Say the comm gets deleted, then what good is the backup if it is
locked on my harddrive forevermore because I can't repost it anywhere? No,
not actually looking for an answer, and the legal ramifications are not
pretty  either, but there you go, my concern in a nutshell. And it remains
completely unsolveable -- the solution I THOUGHT was there, DW, isn't. At
all. For very valid legal reasons. I can't even import the content much less
be worried that it will be safe there or not, so end of the road.

It really IS a deal breaker for me. I don't want to "go halfsies" with all
my comms on LJ and my personal journals on DW. I'll get a DW account to
reserve my usernames in the event that LJ goes "catastrophic failure" but I
foresee that will be all.

And alas, I think this will severely hamper DW's growth. Once major players
realize their comms are not coming over with them, the allure to migrate
will evaporate. I can't think of a single user feature that DW could offer
me that outweighs the community involvement I have at LJ, and I know a lot
of "non-super-users" will feel the same.  :(

::::KBS / Mikey

~Always Blameless~



On Thu, Apr 9, 2009 at 9:17 PM, RLS <[email protected]> wrote:

> 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
>
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