I Just Pinged LJ Regarding the Issue of Linking

[liz_marcs]

Right now, an awful lot of people are saying LiveJournal will ToS your journal if you provide even a link to material LJAbuse would deem ToS-worthy (using, of course, LJ's invisible guidelines that we — the customers and content providers — have yet to see) as if you were hosting the content on the LiveJournal servers.

I'm not talking about displaying images that are hosted on another site (i.e., Photobucket or DeviantArt) using the <<img>> tag.

I'm talking about just providing a link to content or an image using the <<a href>> tag that LJ Abuse deems ToS-worthy.

See the response this user got when he/she asked that question.

Another LJ user asked the same questions and got the same response from an LJ/6A employee. (H/t to wesleysgirl for the link.)

Note that this new off-site linking stance is in direct violation of LJ's own abuse policies.

I want to be clear: I'm not calling the OP a liar, but this response beggars belief as far as I'm concerned,  especially since Web sites change all the time and it's not that hard to imagine a once-innocent link to, say to an article on SuicideGirls (warning link may be NWS), could suddenly become rife with problems.

So I decided to ask Support for myself.

Within seconds of me posting my request Support tagged it as private, so good luck seeing Request#: 797739 if you want to confirm that I did, in fact, do this.

I'll just have to give you the text of what I asked:

There is currently a rumor going around the user base that LJ/6A would delete or suspend a journal if the user links to a Web site or Web page that contains content that the Abuse Team deems as objectionable.

I'm not talking about displaying an objectionable image hosted on, say Photobucket, and linked using the "img" tag.

I'm talking about linking to a site or an image using the "a href" tag.

So, for example, I post a link to a Web site( a link and nothing more) and say someone reports the entry to LJ Abuse.

If LJ Abuse deems that I have, indeed, linked to material that would otherwise get me ToS'd if LJ servers were hosting it, would my account be suspended/deleted because I merely posted a link to another Website?

Thank you for your prompt response on this matter.

As soon as I get a response, I will post it here.

Either that, or LJ is going to ToS me for posting a link to SuicideGirls.

Screw it. If this journal disappears, that's a pretty much solid answer, don't you think?

Comments

[justhuman.livejournal.com]

I've been thinking about this one and believe that they may do it, because they do with copyright violations.

I don't have community names, but I've heard that some download communities had been shut down for passing links to copyrighted material -- for instance, someone upload a TV episode or movie to one of the storage sites like Mediafire and then posted a link in a community.

Copyright holder contacts LJ about someone promoting theft of their material and LJ has to act on it because of the DMCA - federal law that requires them to act.

This is not necessarily the same though, because the obscenity and child porn laws do not necessarily have the same rules and the DMCA. At the very least though, they may have been thinking along those lines until we questioned them hard about it.

[liz-marcs.livejournal.com]

That's why I specifically stated "objectionable material," so that I was very clear about the kind of content I was talking about.

The problem is that several people have got the same answer at this point, but I'm still in "I-don't-believe-it" mode that I had to ask myself.

[ephemera.livejournal.com]

I've heard that some download communities had been shut down for passing links to copyrighted material I've also been told - as a copyright holder - that they *do not* delete accounts / communities / posts over links to the same, and that one needs to go to the *hosting* site. Although this came up maybe a year back, so who knows - maybe they changed the rules. Again.

[liz-marcs.livejournal.com]

Or maybe you got someone on LJAbuse who couldn't be arsed to do it.

I remember hearing a few times that in the early days, LJAbuse used to be famously arbitrary. That somewhat settled down over the years to a near-hands-off policy that erred on the side of almost no enforcement of anything.

Now it seems we're back into arbitrary territory, but now that the user base is so much larger and now that there are so many resources for people to simply pack up and leave, it's snowballed to a massive extent. Throw in that 6A doesn't have the cache that an almost all-volunteer LJ had in the early days, people are not liable to be forgiving.