Hijacking affiliate links

[foxfirefey]

I've been given a heads up that has done some excellent sleuthing and investigation into hijacked LJ affiliate links:

What is LJ doing to my links?
What is LJ doing to my links? Part 2
What is LJ doing to my links? Part 3

Expect this post to be update through the day as I find out more and come up with a good summary.

ETA: No good summary, but

Comments

[mskala]

I wonder what the Livejournal Advisory Board said about this. Does it still exist?

[foxfirefey]

A rep posted about it recently:

http://kylecassidy.livejournal.com/585577.html?format=light

And yeah, apparently the script has been gutted of all code.

[mskala]

The sad, and worrying, thing about this is that it was so predictable. Anyone with half a clue about how Livejournal's users feel about things - or even half a clue about how Internet users in general feel about things - would have been able to guess accurately how the userbase would react to adding an affiliate ID to user-posted links, let alone removing users' own IDs. But the people in charge at Livejournal went ahead with it anyway. Logical conclusion: either they really have no clue how users think, or they really don't care. Neither is good.

If you end up with a mob of pitchfork-wielding users outside your castle gates one time, okay, well, anyone can make a mistake. But when it becomes a regular occurrence, you have to start considering the possibility that you might not be the hero of the story anymore.

[hep]

do you read the things you sign or do you just blindly sign contracts too

[foxfirefey]

Please note that this comment could have been made without the lead in personal insult, and in the future, comments of yours will be expected to be a liiiiittle further from that edge to be unscreened. Giving out contradictory information, discourse, and discussion and whatnot is fine, but it doesn't have to be a slur.

[hep]

how is it a slur? i am honestly asking because i would really like to know

[mskala]

I don't believe that posting affiliate links is against Livejournal's TOS. You have quoted language from the TOS talking about banner ads; those are not the same thing. Your argument that users were violating the TOS and shouldn't expect any sympathy as a result, just doesn't hang together. Nobody promised not to post affiliate links on Livejournal.

However, if Livejournal agreed with your interpretation and thought, correctly or incorrectly, that posting affiliate links were a TOS violation, then they'd have treated it as one - by just removing the affiliate IDs, and/or punishing the users who tried to post such links. That's not what Livejournal did. What Livejournal did was to add its own affiliate links, without telling the users and indeed with some effort (the code obfuscation) to prevent users from finding out. The priority was on putting in Livejournal's ID, not on taking out the users'; indeed, it's been claimed that they didn't even know they were taking out the users' IDs. Livejournal wasn't responding to a real or

[hep]

oh, i agree, it is super shady the way they went about it. but my point is, they are perfectly entitled to do this with their service, and in numerous parts of the tos they spell out that they may in fact at some time do this.

and as for the tos thing, this is one of the situations where it might be good to speak fluent legalese (absolutely not making a slur on you) because you may have not noticed this line where they CYAed:

Engage in commercial activities within LiveJournal or on behalf of LiveJournal without prior approval. This includes, but is not limited to, the following activities:
Displaying a banner that is designed to profit you or any other business or organization; and
Displaying banners for services that provide cash or cash-equivalent prizes to users in exchange for hyperlinks to their web sites.
this means that yes, they specifically mentioned banner ads, but that line about includes but is not limited to infers that any commercial activity in lj is banned, affil links, etc included. now, if this went to court,

[mskala]

Section XIV of the TOS includes the statements "All Content posted to LiveJournal in any way, is the responsibility and property of the author." and "LiveJournal claims no ownership or control over any Content posted by its users." Those could be argued, with strength equal to your present claim, to forbid Livejournal from modifying links posted by users except by blocking them entirely. By your logic, having clearly broken its contractual obligations, Livejournal now entirely deserves absolutely any action whatsoever that users may care to take. They broke their OMG LEGALLY BINDING CONTRACT!!!! Note, too, that since they wrote that contract themselves, none of the "But we didn't know we'd agreed to it!" excuses one might invent, can be applied to Livejournal.

Ultrabroad interpretation of contracts, to the exclusion of any other bounds on behaviour, doesn't work. Seth Finkelstein said it in more detail better than I could.

[foxfirefey]

It's kinda on the edge--if it was really aggressive I wouldn't have unscreened it at all. (For instance, there's a reply to this comment already that isn't going to be unscreened, because it's more aggressive.) If you want an example of a way to phrase it that isn't towards the personal, one instance would be more like "I don't think people should sign contracts without reading them--or use sites without reading the TOS"--putting it back into the realm . I know the difference seems trivial, but it helps make a difference here in the land of no_lj_ads-wankavania to make things a little less heated.

However, LJ (like every other (esp free) service on the internet) puts things in its TOS that give it really, really broad ranging implications, that they never intend to use--on purpose. For instance, "LiveJournal also reserves the right, without limitation, to resell any portion of a user's LiveJournal back to that individual" along with other clauses means LJ could lock up every single journal's contents, and not give the contents to the

[hep]

i definitely definitely understand about tone. i wasn't thinking of anything other than my own inflection in my head when i wrote it, which was more actually questioning and trying to compare

[foxfirefey]

Thanks for understanding about the tone thing. (My previous comment is so full of sad errors from my spacey cold-inflicted head! I even stopped in midsentence there while explaining) I think all I thought about "gashing found" was "What does that even *mean*", ha. Damn the captchas! If only NLJA didn't get enough Google juice or whatever the heck it was that made it so attractive to the spammers.

I can't say I think of it as cheating the system so much as...not actually being entitled to make money from the system, but in most ways I agree--although I think the person you were originally responding to in this thread was only upset on idealogical grounds, if I remember correctly; I don't think they've been posting affiliate links.

If LJ was starting to enforce the policy like that (or had in previous practices been acting closer to that definition--ie, saying that affiliate links are not in line with our TOS in Support Requests about them as opposed to the malware standard issue answer), and said that nobody should post

[mskala]

An affiliate link isn't exactly the same thing as a banner, but more importantly, there's more to this issue than legality. What Livejournal did may have been within Livejournal's legal rights. However, it was morally and socially unacceptable. Livejournal violated users' trust. Even if they might win the court case which will never be brought anyway, Livejournal has a problem now because (if anyone still trusted them anyway, which I don't think very many smart people did) there's a good reason for people not to trust Livejournal anymore. It would be in Livejournal's interest to make some effort to regain the trust of the user base - even if they are not legally required to do anything.

[hep]

*sigh*. actually it does include that, it says "included but not limited to". they mean affil links as well, they mean any profiting off the site. again:

Engage in commercial activities within LiveJournal or on behalf of LiveJournal without prior approval. This includes, but is not limited to, the following activities

[mskala]

Restating your interpretation with the word "morally" inserted several times isn't going to make it any more convincing. But see my other reply. If Livejournal's interpretation of the TOS were the same as yours, then they wouldn't have acted as they did.