Major Suckage

[ravan]

Shoot the fucking lawyers at Danga/LJ. Their new ToS sucks boulders through cocktail straws.

Examples:
* Registration "obligations": During registration, all users are required to provide accurate, complete and current information about themselves in all required fields. and Should LiveJournal.com suspect that your personal information is not complete, current, or accurate, your account may be subject to suspension or termination. So, essentially, pseudononymous users like me are fucked.
* Advertisements: No, they won't do it now, but they reserve the right to do it in the future, with or without prior notice, and you can't change your options if the do.
* Can't post "obscene, vulgar, hateful" stuff: Upload, post or otherwise transmit any content that is in LiveJournal.com's opinion to be unlawful, harmful, threatening, abusive, harassing, tortious, defamatory, vulgar, obscene, libelous, invasive to another's privacy... , hateful, or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable; Great, there go most of my rants, and the childfree community will get fucked over, fast, by all of the trolls and whiners who don't like it.
* Sell you your own content back: LiveJournal.com also reserves the right, without limitation, to resell any portion of a user's LiveJournal back to that individual. Sure, you retain "copyright", but they own it??
* Post content about violence: ... This may include, but is not limited to, providing instructions on how to assemble bombs, grenades and other weapons or incendiary devices; Great, you can find this type of data in a public library in the US, on the ground in other countries, but it's forbidden on LJ??
* Volunteer Enslavement: ...LiveJournal.com member agrees that the intellectual content created as a result of volunteer work for LiveJournal.com constitutes intellectual property of LiveJournal.com and that all rights in said content shall vest in LiveJournal.com at the time that it is created. ... Well, I can't volunteer on LJ, even if I wanted to. Sure, they "get" Open Source... NOT!!!

Read the thing, with all of the lawyer talk for "we let you think you have rights, but buried in the legalese is your enslavement for the 'privilege' of being allowed to use our site, and the privilege of paying for it."

FUCK YOU, DANGA LAWYERS, FUCK YOU AND THE BUYOUT YOU RODE IN ON!!!!!

Edit: Yes, a lot of this stuff was there before, but now Six Apart will be doing the enforcing from a business perspective, and in a COPPA friendly environment. This makes a difference. My gut says that allowing kids onto the site will actually fuck over the adult content, and all posts, public or not, will have to pass kiddie standards.

No, I don't trust Six Apart.

Comments

Re: Major Suckage

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

sorry, i should have said that i consider it positive. when i worked abuse, i really hated suspending the journals of kids just because somebody reported them (the journals themselves were usually entirely innocuous). why should children not have an LJ account? do you think people under 13 don't write journals? i wrote one from when i was 8. and in mmy early teens it would have been great to have a community of people interested in the same things, instead of feeling completely alone.

i basically have no problem with it at all, since the usual protections are already in place.

Re: Major Suckage

[hephaestos.livejournal.com]

I think kids should be able to have online journals, yes. I just think they ought to be separated out, and monitored entirely differently. For example adults should be able to post nude pictures in their LJ; many parents would object to their children seeing that, and it wouldn't happen if it were on a separate service (under the same auspices). It's difficult for young teenagers and other kids to find the community of people interested in the same things they are, when they're dumped into the sea of everybody.

Re: Major Suckage

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

how would having journals on a different server farm prevent children from reading journals on the adult service? those two functions are completely separate; one can read livejournals without even having an LJ account at all.

what LJ does instead works (fairly) well -- adult content should not be visible to any random person who comes along. public areas of the service need to pass a PG-13 test; that is, you may not have full frontal nudies or graphically violent ones as your default userpic, and you may not have such images in your user info. if you have a journal for posting sexually explicit images, you have to control access to it and explicitly exclude children and teens under the legal age for viewing such images. child porn is altogether forbidden and will get your journal immediately suspended.

as somebody who was often not interested in what lots of other people my age were interested, i would have not liked to be shunted off into an age ghetto of some sort. school already filled that role, and to this day i think schooling by age doesn't serve a lot of children well. besides, how hard is it to find fellow "britney spears" fans in an interest search? :) and if one wants to yak without boring old adults, one can always create a community with an upper age limit, instead of a lower one like the sexually oriented ones. usually communities also find their own level of discourse, which has less to do with age than with ... i don't want to say maturity, i think it's more a cultural thing, though maturity might play a role.