The Fandom Politica
Warning: my own personal opinions ahead.
LJ Strikethrough Boldthrough 2007: LJ is well within their rights to dictate what can and cannot be posted to their journals, regardless of whether the material is legal or not. LJ whiners, stop acting like LJ is a right. It’s not. It’s a privilege. They aren’t required to let you use their service.
That said, they are way less fandom-friendly than they used to be, way less transparent than they used to be, and are no longer a small local (to me) company. Not to mention that the way they talk makes it sound like the entire staff equates fanart that ambiguously depicts underage characters with out-and-out child pornography…doesn’t sound very open-minded. Fandom helped make LJ what it is, Six Apart, and it would have been better for you to delete the material and talk to the user rather than delete the user from the get-go, even if you did invite one of them back in the end. I have decided to stop supporting LJ financially by letting my accounts revert back to unpaid when they expire in a couple of months.
Odex: Yes, it sucks that people in Singapore are getting threatening letters demanding money because they’ve been downloading anime. It sucks when this happens to anyone who’s been downloading anything and it’ll be a while before the law in any country figures out the best way to handle it.
That said…sending death threats does not exactly make anime fans look like good and otherwise law-abiding citizens, people. If you want to send a message that anime downloading is a fairly harmless activity, shut the fuck up and ACT like it. Yeesh.
Tags: livejournal, odex, piracy, rants