The timing of this shit cannot be a coincidence.

[emmagrant01]

Wow, I go offline for 8 hours and all hell breaks loose! Apparently there was a post on lj_biz* that implied that content depicting underage fictional characters having sex was no longer going to be allowed on LJ, because they seem to think it violates US law (where the servers are located). But that isn't true AFAIK. Once again, it looks like the people who run LJ are talking out of their asses and not thinking before pressing post.

There is a post about the case law here. I'm not a lawyer, but the gist of the ruling was that works depicting fictional children in sexual situations (i.e. animation, young-looking adults playing children) are not illegal, since (a) no crime was committed in the production of the material (i.e. it's not a record of actual abuse), and (b) there is no evidence that such material causes children to be victimized by pedophiles. As far as I know, that ruling was about visual depictions and doesn't necessarily cover written fiction. But AFAIK, written fiction doesn't count as pornography and as such isn't illegal. Edit: I forgot about the Red Rose Stories (Wiki link), so that's not completely true, though it's still exceedingly rare.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think LJ has a legal reason to ban any of our fanfic or art; i.e. they aren't violating any US laws by allowing that content to be hosted on their servers, which seems to be the argument they're making. (Photomanips are another issue, and I think there probably are legal grounds for banning explicit ones featuring underaged actors.) I know they can do whatever they want, but I'm not particularly worried. Yet.

*There are apparently DH spoilers in the comments of that post, but the post itself contains no spoilers.

Edit: Oh, and I'm emmagrant01 on JF, IF, and GJ as well. tarie is putting together a directory of everyone's alternate journals. Ever on top of things, she also has hilarious icons about this debacle ready for the downloading. ;-)

Son of Edit: They've just made another post on lj_biz that actually concerns me a bit more. :-/

Comments

[emmagrant01.livejournal.com]

This is them trying to clarify their policy after Strikethrough back in June. It's unclear if they are actually going to go after fanfic communities, but in their post they make it clear that they regard written fictional depictions as illegal content.

In their last post:

An example of some of the questions we'll ask in order to determine if material falls into this category are: is this writing intended to eroticize the sexual abuse of children? Is the fact that someone's underage, a critical element of the work, or is it incidental? Is the language excessively graphic instead of suggestive? Is there context beyond the sexual situation, or is the material designed just to focus on the sexualization of minors and nothing more? Does the work have an overall message, or is it written only to appeal to an adult's potential sexual fascination with children? These are only some of the questions we'll ask, and we have to consider everything that's reported to us in context and as a whole.

Over the years, we've looked at thousands of reported journals and communities, and we rarely have come across a case of creative fiction or fanfic text that warrants review. If the content is similar in tone, context, feel, and level of explicitness to something that could be found on the shelves of a national chain bookstores, we'll take that into consideration as well.

That sounds like they aren't ruling out banning fanfic comms that get reported to them.

[belleweather.livejournal.com]

...and they're trusting the same LJ abuse team that can't manage to work out whether a picture of a nursing infant is sexual or not to make this decision?

This is really not good. Especially since the vast majority of people who aren't fans don't really get fanfic in general and underage or sexually explicit fanfic in particular, and it's those people who are going to be making the determinations.

[emmagrant01.livejournal.com]

Yikes. True. :-P

[jedirita.livejournal.com]

It sounds to me like they aren't trying to go after fanfic at all.

I understand how fan folks are interpreting it that way, but I just don't see that as their intent.

[emmagrant01.livejournal.com]

I don't think that's their intent, but it seems that a community like pornish_pixies could be purged under these new guidelines, whereas before they really couldn't ban the comm under their own TOS and had little choice but to reinstate it. So they've changed the rules by which we play, basically. Only time will tell how much of an impact this has on fandom.

[jedirita.livejournal.com]

Do you honestly think they wanted to get rid of Pornish Pixies? I mean, that they were out to get it? Or do you think instead PP just got swept up in the great pedophile purge? Do you think they changed the guidelines in order to enable them to go after groups like PP? Or are they just trying to clarify (however badly) their position with regard to pedophilia?

[emmagrant01.livejournal.com]

I don't think they're going after any particular fandom community, no. But I do think they've decided that in general, they don't want things like chanfic hosted on their servers because they see its relationship to pedophilia as nebulous at best. They don't want to be another Red Rose Stories (see link in post above), and so they're changing their TOS to reflect that. I think most of us are safe for the time being, but if even a few of us get thrown off of LJ for the content of our fic or art, it becomes a slippery slope.

[glorafin.livejournal.com]

From my H/D point of view, I actually think most of what they wrote here is reasonable. They don't try to ban outright anything sexual about teenagers but only to single out posts and comms whose only purpose is to promote underage pornography.

I think though that they should really make a difference between stories between teenagers (are they going to ban One Tree Hill as well?) and stories between adults and teenagers. But if they will, there might be some heavy problems for HP/SS shippers though. That pairing always made me uneasy but I hardly think that those who like it are dangerous in any way.