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

[airawyn.livejournal.com]

Here's the thing - if you find something objectionable on a link, you contact the that person's ISP and deal with it directly.

You have to draw a line somewhere. Traditionally, on the Internet, the line is drawn between the anchor tag and the actual content.

This is not about child porn.

I just linked to something that violates the LJ TOS.

Oops, I did it again.

And once again.

None of these links are pornographic or have anything to do with child porn. If I want to have a discussion about how insane the SPN fandom is or where the line should be drawn on copyright issues, it is not unreasonable to link to the material so that other people know what we're actually discussing.

[nidoking.livejournal.com]

Well, naturally. But suppose that I make something and put it on a hidden page on my website (with a non-intuitive or random sub-URL), meta-tagged to repel searchbots, as a gift for my friends or people who do me a favor, like E-mailing me a response to my question, and one of those people posts a link to it so anyone can find it. It's not illegal by any stretch of the imagination, but it's certainly mean-spirited. Shouldn't I be able to ask people not to link to my content if I don't have the webtool-savvy to prevent it from happening, like Gamefaqs does?

A reasonable person contacts the host of the content, yes. People in general, however, are not reasonable. Remember those stories about the Secret Service threatening to shut down a spoof website because people posted links that would fill in the President's name in an obituary or "threatening" story? (Actually, in that case, the links were as much content as the stories themselves.) I'm still not trying to say that LJ is in the right or doing things the right way, but they are WITHIN their rights to demand that objectionable content not be linked, and we can pack up and leave or we can adjust and deal with it. Child porn was just an example that I threw out there as "the big issue" that everyone's focusing on. They talk about copyright issues sometimes, but everyone who's been named has posted or linked to content that was of questionable child porn status.

[blade-girl.livejournal.com]

but they are WITHIN their rights to demand that objectionable content not be linked

I just don't think this is true. They are within their rights to govern content that is hosted on their servers, but I really think they'd have a hard time making a legal case for banning links to content that exists elsewhere, objectionable or not. First, they'd have to spell that out in the ToS outright, and the problem with that is where would they ever draw the line? Any given link is likely to lead to a link that will eventually lead to "objectionable content." They'd have to ban links of any kind, period, and good fucking luck getting users to use a journaling service that does that.