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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.
( more on this )
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.
