Uh, WTF, LJ?

[jedibuttercup]

Check this out: all LJ accounts that are suspended OR inactive? After an obligatory wait period, the LJ scriptmonkeys will now not only delete the account itself, but EVERY COMMUNITY POST AND COMMENT ever made by that account. ('Inactive' includes communities not posted to in 24 months, as well as similarly sluggish LJ's). Details here.

So much for fic communities being good places to find old orphaned stories. Or old fic-comments on comment-fic memes sticking around for future appreciation. Or old RP stories. LJ's value as an archive (what value it had) is going to be totally gutted by this; who knows how many old authors have moved on to other pastures or retreated from fic in the last couple of years, that will be erased from LJ by the change, not to mention comms for older fandoms and pairings where fic can go a couple of years between posts, but which are still the best index point.

I might have to finally put serious thought into investigating DW as more than just a long-fic posting zone.
~

Comments

[graycardinal]

It suddenly occurs to me that there may be an interesting copyright question here, which might impinge on LJ's ability to purge individual comments and entries-to-communities.

Back in the age of GEnie, one of the concepts that arose from the whole "online community" phenomenon was called "compilation copyright"; basically, GEnie in particular asserted a copyright interest in a collective work consisting of the posts in a particular CATegory/TOPic area of a roundtable. (A TOPic -- the initial caps were command shorthand -- was roughly similar to a threadless LiveJournal, with no distinction between journal entries and comments, and the only sort-arrangement possible being by posting order. A CATegory was a subject-linked group of TOPics; the subject could be "authors A-C" or "Babylon 5", or anything in between; "author TOPics" were GEnie's equivalent of someone's personal LJ.)

But back to "compilation copyright" -- basically, the idea was that the contents of any given TOPic constituted a unique collective work, in which GEnie as service-provider and host asserted a copyright interest. And given the contents of some of those TOPics (which were sometimes used for interactive fiction the same way RP-oriented LJs are used now), there was also the distinct implication that the author/host of a given TOPic also might have an interest in the compilation copyright of his or her TOPic.

The interfaces are different now, but the principle may still apply. If an LJ journal or community is viewed as a "collective work" (and that may be especially true of communities), then selectively removing elements of that collective work -- indeed, effectively destroying it in at least some cases -- without appropriate permissions may constitute a violation of the compilation copyright in that collective work.

I am not a lawyer (let alone an IP lawyer), but this ought to be looked into. Maybe this is something at which to point the OTW?

[jedibuttercup]

Interesting; I didn't know most of that.

It looks like they've backtracked on the "inactive" thing to a degree, but they're leaving up the "delete all posts by deleted accounts" aspect, which still hits that issue.