InsaneJournal

Current mood:

contemplative

Well then, the final piece of the puzzle has fallen into place...
First, (if LJ will let me post now), I want to link everyone to this post written by Stewardess on LJ! . It explains pretty much EVERYTHING regarding exactly what precipitated Strikeout07 and what was driving LJ's actions before, during, and after the mess. It includes a MAJOR piece of information that I was entirely unaware of that makes things make much better sense.

liz_marcs did a great post about various LJ alternatives here. As I've mentioned before, I am personally fond of Insane Journal. And since I am, I wanted to let people know a few things about it that Liz's post didn't go into...

1. First of all, I draw your attention to this post, on the IJ Announcements page. It's a message from the site owner to those of us who are heading over to IJ from here. I've reposted the text here in case you don't want to click over (bolding done by me)...

I see that we have a bunch of new users and a lot of people checking us out. I do welcome all of you. I want to point out to you, that although this site is based in the LiveJournal engine, we are not affiliated or associated with LiveJournal in any way. We are an independently run site.

We understand why a lot of you are coming over here, and we do not believe in censorship beyond the letter of the law. We will not remove any content from the site unless we receive an official DMCA take down notice or are contacted by an offical legal agency notifying us of illegal activity.

That said, we welcome all of you and if you have any issues, please feel free to visit our support area.

This made me feel good about fandom and IJ.

2. I also took a look at IJ's TOS. Here are some of the pertinent passages (bolding done by me)...

JOURNAL CONTENT
Guidelines for posting to your online journal shall be as follows:

All Content posted to InsaneJournal.com in any way, is the responsibility and property of the author. InsaneJournal is committed to keeping the Service in decent standing for all audiences but is not responsible for the monitoring or filtering of any journal Content. Within the confines of international and local law, InsaneJournal.com will not place a limit on the type, or appropriateness of user content within journals. Those users posting material not suitable for all audiences must agree that they are fully responsible for all the content they have posted anywhere on the service. Should content be deemed illegal by such law having jurisdiction over the user, InsaneJournal.com is committed to submitting all necessary information to the proper authorities;

Should any Content be reported to InsaneJournal.com as being offensive or inappropriate, InsaneJournal.com might call upon the author to retract, modify, or protect (by means of private and friends only settings) the Content in question within a reasonable amount of time, as set forth by the InsaneJournal.com staff. Should the author fail to meet such a request from InsaneJournal.com staff, InsaneJournal.com has the full authority to terminate any such reported and verified offensive account holding such inappropriate content. InsaneJournal.com, however, is under no obligation to restrict or monitor journal Content in any way;

InsaneJournal.com claims no ownership or control over any Content posted by its users. The author retains all patent, trademark, and copyright to all Content posted within available fields, and is responsible for protecting those rights, but is not entitled to the help of the InsaneJournal.com staff in protecting such Content;

InsaneJournal.com reserves the right, without limitation except by law, to serve user Content on the web according to the security provisions set forth by the author. InsaneJournal.com also reserves the right, without limitation, to resell any portion of a user's InsaneJournal back to that individual;

You acknowledge that InsaneJournal.com does not pre-screen Content, but that InsaneJournal.com and its designates shall have the right (but not the obligation) on their sole discretion to refuse or remove any Content that is available through the Service. Without limiting the foregoing, InsaneJournal.com and its designates shall have the right to remove any content that violates the TOS or is otherwise objectionable. You agree that you must evaluate, and bear all risks associated with, the use of any content, including any reliance on the accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of such content. Furthermore, InsaneJournal.com reserves the right to limit access to your journal, if found in violation of the TOS, by removing the journal and related user information from the member directory, search engine, and all other methods used in conjunction with finding InsaneJournal.com's users.

MEMBER CONDUCT
You understand that all information, data, text, software, music, sound, photographs, graphics, video, messages or other materials, whether publicly posted or privately transmitted, are the sole responsibility of the person from which such Content originated. InsaneJournal.com does not control Content posted via the Service and, as such, does not guarantee the validity of such Content. You also understand that by using the Service, you may be exposed to Content that is offensive, indecent or objectionable. Should Content be found or reported to be in violation with, but not limited to, the following terms, it will be InsaneJournal.com's sole discretion as to what action should be taken.

You agree to NOT use the Service to:

Upload, post or otherwise transmit any content that is in InsaneJournal.com's opinion to be unlawful, harmful, threatening, abusive, harassing, tortious, defamatory, vulgar, obscene, libelous, invasive to another's privacy (up to, but not excluding any address, email, phone number, or any other contact information with out the written consent of the owner of such information), hateful, or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable;
Harm minors in any way, as seen by InsaneJournal.com or applicable law;

.........Edited out by me because it was boring and not applicable to fandom......

Upload, post or otherwise transmit any content that infringes any patent, trademark, trade secret, copyright or other proprietary rights of any party;

.......Edited out by me because it was boring and not applicable to fandom.........

If any user is reported to be in violation with the letter or spirit of these terms, InsaneJournal.com retains the right to terminate such account at any time without further warning.

3. This is from IJ's Abuse FAQ with bolding done by me. Pay special attention to the second question...

» What kind of material is prohibited on InsaneJournal?

We take pride in trying to provide users with as much freedom of speech as possible. However, there is certain material that InsaneJournal does not permit. Most prohibited content is either banned due to United States or international treaty law, or is not allowed in an effort to keep the service usable for all members.

This is not an exhaustive list. For a full listing of the Terms of Service, see http://www.insanejournal.com/legal/tos.bml (particularly Section XVI: Member Conduct). The content of this FAQ is intended solely to illustrate some common examples of what are considered to be Terms of Service violations.

Comments, entries, journals and posts not permitted on InsaneJournal include but are not limited to:

-- Content created solely to harass another user
-- Material that invades the privacy of another user by posting personal information
-- Material that meets the United States legal definition of "indecent"
-- Instructions on how to break the law
-- Child pornography (explicit, nude, or erotic pictures taken of anyone under the age of 18, whether or not the model is over 18 at the time of posting)
-- Material that infringes on the copyright or patent of an individual or corporation
-- Unsolicited advertising of any service, goods, or forum (including InsaneJournal communities)
-- Content intended to interfere with another user's use of the site
-- Content that is motivated by hatred towards an individual, race, ethnicity, or orientation
-- Any other material that is a violation of applicable state, federal, or international law

If you find certain content objectionable, but it is not a violation of the Terms of Service, the Abuse team will not take action. For instance, a comment posted in the middle of a debate that contains opinions you personally find distasteful, but which is not harassing, indecent, or libelous, would not be a violation of the Terms of Service.


» To what level of decency are journals held?

InsaneJournal generally holds to the standards of "indecency" set forth by the United States Supreme Court decision handed down in the case "Miller vs. California".

The "Miller Test" for defining indency sets forth three guidelines:

-- The average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest;
-- the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexually explicit conduct;
-- a reasonable person must find the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.

In order for material to be considered indecent, it must meet these guidelines (with the exception of material that is illegal under applicable law, such as sexual images of minors).

Also, InsaneJournal has many users that are legally underage to view explict material. Because of this, in some cases, stricter guidelines can be imposed. In particular, posts to non-age-restricted communities, comments in others' journals, and default user picture icons should be kept free of explicit content.

If you frequently post material to your journal that can be considered of an "adult" nature, InsaneJournal asks that you place a warning in your User Information ("bio") to that nature, warning that underage users should not view your journal. This is not mandatory, but can serve to protect both you and InsaneJournal.

If you are the maintainer of a community in which users regularly post explicit images, you must monitor the membership of your community carefully to make sure that all of your members are of legal age to view such material. Again, this is to protect both you and InsaneJournal.

So, what I take most of that to mean is that while yes, IJ has the same standard clause in their TOS that any other website does about copyright infringement, with the fact that the site owner specifically stated that policy is to remove content only with a DMCA notice or at the request of a legal agency, I get the impression that they aren't all the bothered by fandom content. And I would be shocked to find any site's TOS that didn't call it forbidden to attempt to avoid liability and I would expect all sites to comply with DMCA notices and/or legal agencies. But the impression that I got from that statement was that they will not start deleting journals for a neo-nazi organization.

They don't police journal content, and I like the fact that their TOS specifically states that they may ask you to remove or put a flock on content that is complained about, instead of suspending you for it. By stating that they use The Miller Test to determine indecency, I am reassured because that is actually pretty liberal. If the average person applying the standards of the fandom community finds something obscene and without literary, artistic, political, or scientific value, it would have to be REALLY REALLY bad. And I would think that the argument could be made that breastfeeding icons have artistic or political value and are certainly not sexually explicit, so we wouldn't have a repeat of nipplegate.

They do ask that we flock adult content and that communities that allow it check the ages of their members, but that doesn't seem unreasonable, and a lot of comms do that on LJ anyway. They also ask that we place a disclaimer on our profiles if a site contains adult content, but again, that's not really a huge deal.

Also, there are currently roughly 33k users on IJ. On an interest search, I found the following...

Incest - 4 users
Rape - 1 community, 3 users
Wincest - 4 users
Torture - 1 community, 16 users
Lolita - 1 community, 13 users
Shota - 2 users
Porn - 1 community, 66 users
Killing - 1 community, 14 journals
Murder - 2 communities, 30 journals
Sexual Assault - 1 community

Anyway, you get the idea. I tried to pull interests from the lists that LJ Abuse sent out to people regarding why their journals were suspended. The point I was trying to make is simply that I can find people on IJ with these interests, and they don't have suspended accounts.

Bottom line here, I suppose, is that I am pimping IJ for those who are considering a migration. I can't guarantee that it will never be bought by some big company like 6A and turn into a different place, but at the moment it seems to be a good alternative. GJ seems to be a bit wonky, at least for me (I'm having to hit refresh quite a bit), and as much as I like JF, free accounts are nearly impossible to get, and not everyone in fandom can afford one. While I know that quite a few people were content to take the apology from 6A as enough to convince them to stay, I still have to wonder how much of an effect 6A going public might have on all of these new policies that they are writing. There's also the question of how much say, if any, stockholders might at some point may get regarding acceptable content. So I'm posting this for those who are still concerned about LJ and who may be considering migration now or at some point in the future.

Me personally? I'm bubble_blunder on IJ and GJ (Feel free to friend me). But I'm not planning on going anywhere without my fandom. What would be the point? Of course, if you guys move, then I'm right there with ya!

That's all for tonight!

~Lisa