Here we go again:
LJ News is full of excitable squeaking that Lj is suspending journals again, without notice.
A few thoughts and problems here:
1) As queerbychoice and others have noticed, Livejournal has chosen to use California's age of consent, 18, which is not the age of consent in all countries or even all U.S. states. What this means is that LJ may be restricting writing about activities that may be perfectly legal for the user, since not all of LJ's users live in California.
2) Despite a major firestorm the last time this happened, LJ has gone back to the suspending without warning. Since I didn't see the material I frankly have no idea if the suspensions were justified or not, but I would agree that it might have been better to give the users 24 hours to take down any offending material.
3) And to those in the fandom community: you know that this sort of thing can happen -- and by "this sort of thing" I mean suspensions of and deletions of material deemed to violate copyright. And why? Because Warner Brothers, J.K. Rowling, et. al have every right to defend their copyrighted material.
If you in turn believe that you should be allowed to use copyrighted characters, then my suggestion is simple: work to change and clarify the law. As it stands, U.S. copyright law is based on legislation written in 1978, well before the internet and new media methods arose. I think we can all agree that given multiple copyright issues - music downloading, filesharing, mashups, fanfiction, fair use, parody, scholarly citation issues - the law could use another hard look and definitely some clarification. Write your representatives, who for the most part have probably never heard of fanfiction, and explain your take on the subject.
As I've noted elsewhere, we appear to be shifting back to an artistic paradigm last seen in the Middle Ages, where writers and artists happily borrowed characters and stories for one another -- indeed, the Middle Ages and early Renaissance artists prided themselves on artistic renditions of old, well known stories, not on the creation of new stories. (Shakespeare used all of two new and original plots, and even the originality of those has been questioned.) What mattered was how well you told the tale, not your ability to construct your own new universe. The advent of the printing press changed this, and created copyright law and a new emphasis on originality. Whether or not this paradigm is a good change or not is a separate question.
A few thoughts and problems here:
1) As queerbychoice and others have noticed, Livejournal has chosen to use California's age of consent, 18, which is not the age of consent in all countries or even all U.S. states. What this means is that LJ may be restricting writing about activities that may be perfectly legal for the user, since not all of LJ's users live in California.
2) Despite a major firestorm the last time this happened, LJ has gone back to the suspending without warning. Since I didn't see the material I frankly have no idea if the suspensions were justified or not, but I would agree that it might have been better to give the users 24 hours to take down any offending material.
3) And to those in the fandom community: you know that this sort of thing can happen -- and by "this sort of thing" I mean suspensions of and deletions of material deemed to violate copyright. And why? Because Warner Brothers, J.K. Rowling, et. al have every right to defend their copyrighted material.
If you in turn believe that you should be allowed to use copyrighted characters, then my suggestion is simple: work to change and clarify the law. As it stands, U.S. copyright law is based on legislation written in 1978, well before the internet and new media methods arose. I think we can all agree that given multiple copyright issues - music downloading, filesharing, mashups, fanfiction, fair use, parody, scholarly citation issues - the law could use another hard look and definitely some clarification. Write your representatives, who for the most part have probably never heard of fanfiction, and explain your take on the subject.
As I've noted elsewhere, we appear to be shifting back to an artistic paradigm last seen in the Middle Ages, where writers and artists happily borrowed characters and stories for one another -- indeed, the Middle Ages and early Renaissance artists prided themselves on artistic renditions of old, well known stories, not on the creation of new stories. (Shakespeare used all of two new and original plots, and even the originality of those has been questioned.) What mattered was how well you told the tale, not your ability to construct your own new universe. The advent of the printing press changed this, and created copyright law and a new emphasis on originality. Whether or not this paradigm is a good change or not is a separate question.