Who owns a DW/LJ comm, and can LJ 'take away' your permanent account if you get too big?

[charmian]

Big old disclaimer: IANAL (I Am Not A Lawyer), and so if you see me saying something which is definitely not legal or just plain crazy in a legal way, feel free to tell me.

I've been talking to an anon who has some interesting thoughts on the whole ONTD+LJ situation in the last entry

One thing which interested me was the whole situation of LJ requesting that a permanent account holder put ads on their permanent account as a condition of continued service. Obviously, they can and have done that, and no one really disagrees with LJ's decision. I wonder, though, if this sets a precedent. Now that LJ has established that if an account is disruptive enough to LJ's servers, even if no bots or other malicious usage is occurring, their usage of LJ may be threatened. Perhaps it would be good if LJ established this as an overt policy. (I wonder about DW? Obviously they would not do ads, but if a comm or individual journal grew large enough to the point where it began to place a huge burden on the service, as ONTD has done...? If this were to happen, they would probably see it coming, so I am sure a policy would be created to address the matter.)

The other thing is, whither the 'ownership' of ONTD? Who 'owns' a community on LJ? According to Brenden, the new Editor of ONTD, "when I was approached last month - it was IMPLIED that LJ owned ONTD" (from this comment). Not knowing the actual quote, it's impossible to say what LJ really meant by this, but who really owns a community? What does it mean to own an LJ community?

Legally speaking, AFAIK, the individual content on a community is owned by the person holding copyright to it. AFAIK there is no implied agreement (legally) when posting to a community that you give up any of your copyright. (Could one be created, and if so, would it be legally binding? For example, if I made a post that said 'before joining this community, you agree that all content posted to this community belongs to the mods.') So if I make a post to a community, (if I understand correctly) I own the content of the post, legally speaking, and if you repost the content without my permission, you are violating my rights. The same is true with comments, I think.


However, is an LJ community=the sum of its content? I'm not sure. There's also the actual 'physical space' the comm is located at, i.e., its address on the internet, and the name of the comm itself, and any 'property' which it may own (say, icons... not that comms can use icons. But if they could!)

As for the address on the internet, if it is http://community.livejournal.com/YOURCOMMNAME, it can't be really said that the comm maintainer 'owns' it, but rather more like 'leases' it from LJ, and LJ is the true owner. If it were not an LJ comm, but some site SITENAME.COM, then that would be owned to whomever it was registered to. However, I doubt that the internet address is the same as the comm itself.

Then there's the actual name of the comm. However, I seriously doubt that anyone has trademarked the name of their LJ comm, if that is even trademarkable, given that you're not supposed to engage in commercial activity on LJ. I'm not even sure if McDonalds could file suit against me if I named my LJ comm "McDonalds," as long as I didn't claim that I was the official rep of McDonalds.

Well, however legally/philosophically one slices comm 'ownership,' the fact remains that maintainers have a lot of control over an LJ comm, even if they may not be the legal owners of it. Within LJ policy, though, this control is not absolute. If a comm is idle, LJ will under some circumstances get rid of the unresponsive maintainer and make a willing community member maintainer. This seems to argue that the maintainer's control, even in cases of them not being say, kicked off LJ or grossly abusing their power, depends on the will of LJ, and is not absolute. Perhaps this really argues that the comms do really belong to LJ, while the content belongs to whoever posted it/has copyright to it. (Does this policy, BTW, exist on DW? I couldn't find it in the FAQs)

(BTW, can I also break into say that I think this whole system where the maintainers can randomly remove each other is crazy? There needs to be an ultimate authority, IMHO)

Comments

[tresjolie9]

Might as well de-anon, and post under my own screen name. I don't think this will get me in too much trouble!

One thing which interested me was the whole situation of LJ requesting that a permanent account holder put ads on their permanent account as a condition of continued service. Obviously, they can and have done that, and no one really disagrees with LJ's decision. I wonder, though, if this sets a precedent. Now that LJ has established that if an account is disruptive enough to LJ's servers, even if no bots or other malicious usage is occurring, their usage of LJ may be threatened. Perhaps it would be good if LJ established this as an overt policy. (I wonder about DW? Obviously they would not do ads, but if a comm or individual journal grew large enough to the point where it began to place a huge burden on the service, as ONTD has done...? If this were to happen, they would probably see it coming, so I am sure a policy would be created to address the matter.)

I agree with you, LJ needs to have clear policies as to when permanent or paid accounts reach a point where they have become too much of a burden on the system, and whoever is in charge either needs to pay the additional cost of maintaining such a site , or allow the site to take over and put ads on. Something like "once you receive one million posts, membership of over 60,000 users, so many hits per day, you have a choice of ads, or an additional fee?"

Dreamwidth also needs to take this into consideration. What happens if ONTD gets booted from LJ, and the ONTD'ers migrate to Dreamwidth? Or if a Dreamwidth comm ever becomes an ONTD?

The other thing is, whither the 'ownership' of ONTD? Who 'owns' a community on LJ? According to Brenden, the new Editor of ONTD, "when I was approached last month - it was IMPLIED that LJ owned ONTD" (from this comment). Not knowing the actual quote, it's impossible to say what LJ really meant by this, but who really owns a community? What does it mean to own an LJ community?

Both excellent points. I always assumed that the "mod" owned a community, but things can get blurry, especially if a comm has several mods, and or the original mod quit at some point!

Legally speaking, AFAIK, the individual content on a community is owned by the person holding copyright to it. AFAIK there is no implied agreement (legally) when posting to a community that you give up any of your copyright. (Could one be created, and if so, would it be legally binding? For example, if I made a post that said 'before joining this community, you agree that all content posted to this community belongs to the mods.') So if I make a post to a community, (if I understand correctly) I own the content of the post, legally speaking, and if you repost the content without my permission, you are violating my rights. The same is true with comments, I think.

I would guess, but it is merky!

However, is an LJ community=the sum of its content? I'm not sure. There's also the actual 'physical space' the comm is located at, i.e., its address on the internet, and the name of the comm itself, and any 'property' which it may own (say, icons... not that comms can use icons. But if they could!)

As for the address on the internet, if it is http://community.livejournal.com/YOURCOMMNAME, it can't be really said that the comm maintainer 'owns' it, but rather more like 'leases' it from LJ, and LJ is the true owner. If it were not an LJ comm, but some site SITENAME.COM, then that would be owned to whomever it was registered to. However, I doubt that the internet address is the same as the comm itself.

That is a good point, and honestly something to think about when starting an LJ comm which might be extra successful. Perhaps it might be wise to invest in the comm's domain name just in case the comm does become extremely successful!

Well, however legally/philosophically one slices comm 'ownership,' the fact remains that maintainers have a lot of control over an LJ comm, even if they may not be the legal owners of it. Within LJ policy, though, this control is not absolute. If a comm is idle, LJ will under some circumstances get rid of the unresponsive maintainer and make a willing community member maintainer. This seems to argue that the maintainer's control, even in cases of them not being say, kicked off LJ or grossly abusing their power, depends on the will of LJ, and is not absolute. Perhaps this really argues that the comms do really belong to LJ, while the content belongs to whoever posted it/has copyright to it. (Does this policy, BTW, exist on DW? I couldn't find it in the FAQs)

I don't know about DW, but I've always found it troublesome that there are "maintainer" and "moderator" positions, where the powers of a simple maintainer aren't enough to say tweak a comm's layout. On the one hand, at least LJ is willing to look at a comm situation and give comm a willing member if the original maintainer disappears, unlike what was used to happen on Yahoo Groups when maintainers/moderators went MIA. But on the other hand, why not have different degrees of "maintainer," where the person in charge can appoint moderators different positions? Yahoo groups used to have an option where a comm's moderator could give "maintainers," different types of powers, I think some were to the point where they could do basically everything but delete the group. LJ and DW should follow suit with that one.

[foxfirefey]

I don't know about DW, but I've always found it troublesome that there are "maintainer" and "moderator" positions, where the powers of a simple maintainer aren't enough to say tweak a comm's layout.

You've got it a bit backwards--maintainers have the power (well, they're called community admins now) and moderators only have the power to moderate posts and whatnot. And DW does want to work on splitting up admin permissions into different degrees, so that somebody can be assigned to do the style, other groups can be assigned to do tags, other people have the ability to freeze comments but not delete them, force an LJ-cut, etc etc.

[tresjolie9]

That is understandable, because the programing to do that would probably be difficult, and it could be a nightmare from an administrative standpoint.

[foxfirefey]

It's a pretty decently sized project, which is why it hasn't been done yet, but I'm looking forward to it being completed myself.

[tresjolie9]

That is good, and I look forward to seeing DW do that. I like the idea of differently mod duties being assigned to different moderators. I also love the idea of moderators/maintainers being able to force an LJ cut if necessary. The ability not to do that is something that annoys me sometimes about LJ.

[niqaeli]

Actually, I'm pretty sure comments are moderately different territory than entries? As I understand it, anyway. I seem to recall that the thing about using OpenID on imported comments here on Dreamwidth wasn't actually strictly a legal matter, but a netiquette matter -- it was about not pissing everyone off by disallowing them control over comments when they had had said control on the originating site, but I recall that strictly legally the owner of the journal has control over the comments posted to it.

I could be totally full of it on that, of course. Not a lawyer nor have i even made that much of a point to study up on the matter.

[charmian]

Yeep, trouble from who? Is there a 'the first rule of ONTD is that you don't talk about ONTD' thing going on?

Yeah, I was wondering if that was somewhere in LJ's TOS, that they could do this. Maybe there will never be another ONTD-sized monster comm, but what if there is? Since DW right now doesn't seem to be growing that quickly, I don't think a giant comm could come popping out of nowhere, but if there should start to be an ONTD-like server buster, I hope they do something about the situation. Anyway, I doubt that ONTDers would want to come to DW, because there's the whole invite code requirement also.

Re: mod/maintainer ownership: As I think more about it, I'm not so sure that it's that a mod/maintainer owns a community as much as 'controls' it.

Ehhh, I think the domain name is only really useful if you're planning to have the comm in question leave LJ/DW, because of as right now, the domain name remapping is very bad. It's honestly more like redirection than anything, which is seriously.... inadequate, especially since services that make you pay for it, like wordpress.com, give you true domain name remapping, and there are some sites which give you it for free, like tumblr and Posterous.

I guess my objection to the situation is more that there isn't a clear hierarchy of maintainers; it doesn't bother me as much that there are different categories of mods and maintainers, although perhaps their duties could be more flexibly separated. I suppose the way I would do it is create another category, called 'owner' who has the power to appoint mods and maintainers and cannot be removed by any of them.

[charmian]

IANAL, but I thought the thing was that if you allowed the person the ability to delete the comment, then it would be a waste of their time to file a DMCA against the site. I did hear some people saying that maybe the comments should be considered part of the journal, as a collaborative work, but I don't think they were lawyers and there wasn't any legal precedent behind that. To my unlearned mind though, I don't see why commenting on a site constitutes me being unable to withdraw my permission to publish my 'work' later. I mean, LJ is the owner of LJ, right? So does that mean that if there were no TOS giving me rights, that it would mean they legally owned any comments and journal entries posted there?

I think it's more like sending a letter into the editor, but they have a notice there saying that by sending stuff in you are consenting to publication. I recall a case of an internet advice column in an online magazine where there were problems when the columnist answered an email, but the email sender later changed their mind and insisted that it be removed or something, even though you'd think that someone sending an email to an ADVICE COLUMNIST would realize that it could be published.

[niqaeli]

Yeah, I dunno. Like I said, I haven't really looked at the law on it. Intellectual property law is a tangled, eldritch horror in the first plce and it just gets worse when it intersects w/ the internet.

[tresjolie9]

Yeep, trouble from who? Is there a 'the first rule of ONTD is that you don't talk about ONTD' thing going on?

Lol, no, I'm just paranoid.

Yeah, I was wondering if that was somewhere in LJ's TOS, that they could do this. Maybe there will never be another ONTD-sized monster comm, but what if there is?

There is always the possibility for it, also there might be some journal, or comm which catches national attention to the point where it is getting millions of hits. Say some LJ'er posts something on a comm, or on their journal which results in everyone in the world wants to see it?

Since DW right now doesn't seem to be growing that quickly, I don't think a giant comm could come popping out of nowhere, but if there should start to be an ONTD-like server buster, I hope they do something about the situation. Anyway, I doubt that ONTDers would want to come to DW, because there's the whole invite code requirement also.

One never knows, LJ could go down during some huge TV event, someone creates a backup comm, gets some type of invite chain hiarchy, and before you know it, you have a server busting comm on DW!

For instance, during the final airing of the Conan O'Brien show, something which had been getting high traffic posts on Ohnotheydidn't, LJ decided it was high time to maintain their servers. A back up comm was started on IJ, and down IJ went!

Ehhh, I think the domain name is only really useful if you're planning to have the comm in question leave LJ/DW, because of as right now, the domain name remapping is very bad. It's honestly more like redirection than anything, which is seriously.... inadequate, especially since services that make you pay for it, like wordpress.com, give you true domain name remapping, and there are some sites which give you it for free, like tumblr and Posterous.

Well, there are some comms which do it when they become infamous on the web. I'm not talking about all comms doing it, but super high profile comms which may define a website.

I guess my objection to the situation is more that there isn't a clear hierarchy of maintainers; it doesn't bother me as much that there are different categories of mods and maintainers, although perhaps their duties could be more flexibly separated. I suppose the way I would do it is create another category, called 'owner' who has the power to appoint mods and maintainers and cannot be removed by any of them.

I think the idea of an "owner" is a great idea, has most of the power and cannot be removed unless they decide to quit. When they decide to quit, they have to appoint a new owner. If they don't log into LJ or DW for a given amount of time, and their e-mail starts bouncing, the site may make someone else an owner.

[charmian]

Huh, I didn't recall the time the last Conan show brought LJ down. On the other hand, I don't really use the site much these days. I guess since DW seems more robust than IJ, there would be more incentive for ONTD to come here, but I still think the invite codes would be difficult, as you don't automatically get new invite codes when you start an account, IIRC. (Or do you?) You mostly get them if you ask for them, and it takes awhile for you to get awarded them.

[tresjolie9]

The second to last show didn't bring LJ down, it was fine for the last shows shows, and they managed to get 5,000 posts for his penultimate shows and the site was fine. However LJ "went down for an hour's maintenance," during the final Conan episode, forcing the ONTD Conan fans to do a live post elsewhere on the web, Insanejournal. I think it would have been DW, but since DW requires invite codes, it would have been difficult to do.

[cesy]

Would it be worth requesting the invite codes in advance, or even distributing them in advance, just in case?

[tresjolie9]

That could have been done, but no one knew how many ONTD'ers would be showing up to the post, and how to go about arranging for everyone who needs one to get an invite code.

[charmian]

Yeah, I think that's definitely true, especially when the users are in the hundreds. If they're going to use DW as a group, it makes more sense for them to all get accounts before these things happen.

[tresjolie9]

If it were to be done that way, there certainly would have been a round of "pass the DW invite codes so we can post on dreamwidth."

Would the DW TPTB have minded having this just for one night?

[charmian]

Actually, I have no idea what they would think. I'm sure they wouldn't object to people creating gossip comms or whatever, though.

[cesy]

Why not just suggest to everyone to go and get one now? It's not like there's a big shortage.

[tresjolie9]

Not really a gossip comm per say, just a "live post," where people post their thoughts as they watch a TV show. It can easily get 1,000 posts in an hour.

In retrospect it might have been an interesting way to test the Dreamwidth servers to see how they would hold up to the type of traffic this got them.

[tresjolie9]

This happened a few months ago, and I didn't have that much say in what was going on.

However now that I do maintain a late night comm, that frequently does live posts, not that LJ has been acting up, I've been promoting the site's "backup Dreamwidth" comm, and trying to get them to get DW accounts.

Just waiting for the day Livejournal goes down during Craig Ferguson.

[charmian]

1,000 comments, don't you mean?

Huh, if it's that kind of traffic, I think maybe they might want to talk to Mark or Denise about that.

[tresjolie9]

Yes, 1,000 comments, possibly more in an hour. It would have been something to talk to one of them about, and get their permission first. Don't know if Dreamwidth would be robust enough to handle it.

[cesy]

Why not submit a support request and ask? I'd love to see more active comms like this on Dreamwidth, and it would be a good test of the servers.

[tresjolie9]

It would have been nice, but the final Conan already aired two months ago. This was just for one night.

The separate but related comm I mod would be a bit tough to move to Dreamwidth.

[azurelunatic]

If, in the future, you need to get a bunch of people on DW fast, try popping into #dreamwidth on irc.freenode.net (someone, entirely possibly me, would be happy to walk you through getting into IRC) and let people know that you have a Large Bunch of People who you want invitations for.

The owners will do group codes under some circumstances if they deem it advisable.

Of course, there's no guaranteeing that the owners are actually going to be awake at the time of any given crisis, but there's always the chance. (Mark tends to maintain a vaguely-diurnal schedule though he stays up late, but D is entirely non-24-hour.)

[sophie]

Another thing that comes to mind: If LJ "own" the community, but just allow the maintainers to, well, maintain it, what does that mean for importing communities into Dreamwidth?

[charmian]

Well, the only thing that is imported is data, and it can be argued that LJ doesn't own the data anyway.

[denise]

We totally and completely couldn't handle something the size of ONTD on an ongoing basis. Just flat out couldn't. We don't have the infrastructure, we don't have the bandwidth, and we don't have the sysadmin staff. ONTD breaks LJ, which has, oh, about twenty times the infrastructure that we have. If ONTD wanted to move over, w'd probably have to say no. (We'd probably help them set up ther own DW install, though, if they wanted. DW is a lot easier to install and maintain than LJ is.)

We can handle moderately high-traffic comms if their activity is spread out over time. For instance, we're OK with scans_daily, because they don't hit ONTD levels of activity. But even they did cause a noticeable increase in load (not one that we couldn't handle, but it definitely showed on the traffic graphs).

We are set up in such a way that we can add additional server power pretty quickly if we need to. But we'd have to see a long-term need for it, not a single day/week -- if, say, LJ went down and the whole of ONTD decided to move here for a backup for one day or whatever, it's likely that the whole site would crawl for everybody for that one night. :)

(I should add, having gone back and read your earlier comments in the thread -- an entry/journal/comm getting a thousand comments in an hour would be just fine. It's when a comm gets a thousand posts in a day, each with a thousand comments, and with a hundred thousand members like ONTD has, that there starts to be a problem ...)

[tresjolie9]

I didn't mean to imply bringing all of ONTD over, just a hypothetical situation as to what would have happened if 100 or so late night fans ended up posting all at once while a TV show were airing live, would DW be able to handle it, or would it bring the servers to a crawl?

[denise]

Oh! Yeah, that'd be fine, absolutely. That's covered under more-or-less normal usage.

[foxfirefey]

I don't think LJ wants to own the content. LJ wants to monetize a high-load community that is expensive to maintain and run, and I kinda think that's fair. I don't think LJ should have to run ONTD as charity; the only alternative would be to start putting limits that would severely cramp the community, such as member limits, posting/comments per day limits, all posts on ONTD are members only, etc. But doing that wouldn't be good for LJ or the community. The new deal isn't perfect, I'll grant you, but that's because sometimes ideal solutions don't exist for a problem.

[matgb]

Why would they need invite codes? If they only want to comment, what'd be wrong with OpenIDs?

[anarchicq]

I never felt that I owned comms on LJ, and I wouldn't feel I owned comms on DW either. I merely moderate them. From there, the rules vary from comm to comm, mod to mod regarding who owns the content. LJ(And DW) owns the actual comm.

I mean, look at what happened to Pornish Pixies...

[charmian]

Interesting, though, does is comm policy binding? I mean, say someone banned from a comm wants to delete their content, would LJ or DW force the comm to delete the content, or would the comm policy that content belongs to the mod or the comm itself stand?

Wasn't that LJ TOS'ing them, though? That could have happened to a personal journal as well (being kicked out of LJ for content reasons) but I wouldn't say in that case that indicated that LJ owned the content of the journal, or the journal itself; it's more like if I was kicked off of a hosting provider, IMHO.

[anarchicq]

Obviously I could only speak for my piddle-y comms, so I will.

If someone was banned from my comm, they have every right to contact me/A mod and ask for the content to be removed. And then it's removed at the mod's discretion I guess.

And yes, my point is that it was an LJ TOSing, meaning they can do whatever they want, whenever they want, because it's theirs. I think of LJ AS the hosting provider, so maybe that's where a bit of confusion is coming in.

I'm sorry if I sound snarky, I've just been deleted from services, had HD crashes, random service providers going down so many times that I've become jaded as to the whole who owns what online topic. I don't mean to be rude.

[charmian]

Oh yeah, but I mean, what if you said "no, it's my policy as the mod that the content is MINE and I won't." I am wondering in that situation who really is in the legal/LJ policy right there.

Oh, I don't think you're being rude. I guess what I'm saying is that the hosting provider has a right to boot people from the service, but in that situation, they wouldn't be making a claim to own the content. IIRC, LJ TOS says that they don't make a claim to own the content either, so I don't think the fact that LJ or a hosting provider having the right to boot someone has anything to do with whether they own the content (have legal copyright to it) or not.

[anarchicq]

You're right. The two should be un-connected.
And when a person is banned from LJ, any posts they make in comms are auto-deleted, IIRC.

It gets murky with comms. I guess I'm a little naive but I can't imagine a mod saying "No, we own this content." I mean, really? I think that would be frowned upon if brought to the forefront. Ultimately the mod is just a person in front of a screen just like all of us, who says they have rights over my 500 word post about the dynamic between SailorMoon and SailorMars?

[anarchicq]

Hey, check this out. Specifically #7
Blogger Law.
I found it on the AbsoluteWrite writer forums.

[charmian]

Hmm, this is as I thought it was, although I had not previously considered the way that anonymous postings make it impossible to figure out who has legal title to a posting.

"But by including a terms of service which spells out that you will have a license in all content posted in the site and more specifically that you will not have a duty to modify or withdraw posts but you may do so if you choose, you can ensure that you have effective control over the user-driven content on your site even if you do not have actual ownership of the content."

I think this is exactly what DW and LJ do have, so they're pretty clear under this. (A license and them reserving for themselves the right to withdraw/delete postings)

[charmian]

Huh, really? I didn't know that.

I find it hard to believe also, and also, technically they don't have such powers, IIRC, because you can always delete posts as the creator... although IIRC I recall that it can be tricky to delete them if they were locked and you're banned from a comm.

[anarchicq]

I was banned from LJ once years ago, for alleged spamming, and all the old posts by me were removed, even in comms I founded and modded.

However, I think that if a person is banned from LJ and owns a comm, the comm still sticks around, but it's modd-less (presuming there was only the one mod to begin with.)

[foxfirefey]

Sounds like you were suspended, which yeah, hides all posts and comments.

But being banned from a specific community won't remove the posts or comments unless the moderator (or person being banned) deletes them.

[goodbyebird]

Commenting only requires an OpenID. No codes needed.