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]

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.