illegal and harmful activity, oh really?

I hope you have all seen the post "illegal and harmful activity" at lj_biz, if not the link is here

It seems they are going to use community standards to decide what is permitted on LJ. It was suggested we needed a community to say what the LJ community wanted, so one has been created whatisobscene, go join, make your voice heard.

We need to do this, cos the post is so misleading.

ETA Is it just me or did they post this today because they think all the Harry Potter fans will be queing up for the book for the next couple of days?

more clarifications (?)

So more "clarifications" from LJ. This seems to be the gist of it

"We also wanted to clarify that we aren't proactively seeking violations of this policy, and require anyone who reports something to us, to provide specific examples of our policies being violated -- links to individual entries, rather than links to entire journals or communities.

We aren't making these decisions in a vacuum. Groups of people from various parts of the LiveJournal team are going to evaluate anything that's reported to us using a standard that we hope accommodates as many of the diverse views of our global community as possible, within the constraints placed on us by United States law."

The main item seems to be

"An example of some of the questions we'll ask in order to determine if material falls into this category are: is this writing intended to eroticize the sexual abuse of children? Is the fact that someone's underage, a critical element of the work, or is it incidental? Is the language excessively graphic instead of suggestive? Is there context beyond the sexual situation, or is the material designed just to focus on the sexualization of minors and nothing more? Does the work have an overall message, or is it written only to appeal to an adult's potential sexual fascination with children? These are only some of the questions we'll ask, and we have to consider everything that's reported to us in context and as a whole."

While this is interesting

"Over the years, we've looked at thousands of reported journals and communities, and we rarely have come across a case of creative fiction or fanfic text that warrants review. If the content is similar in tone, context, feel, and level of explicitness to something that could be found on the shelves of a national chain bookstores, we'll take that into consideration as well."

It seems that really the situation is much the same as it was before. The abuse team will only look at posts as they are sent to them, so the community is still policing themselves, as far as I can make out.

It covers art work as well, and inciting people to commit illegal activities, hate crimes, violence and rape. Ok, so still needs some definition to say what "incites" these crimes. I mean if my vampire commits such acts while he is evil, by mentioning it at all would that mean it might "incite" someone.....or any villain in a piece of fiction, what can our villains do now? Or if it is something you would find on the book shelf of Borders, that is OK, and off I go?

I was wondering if I did a character study of Angel/Buffy's relationship in Season 2, with a 17 year old girl and a MUCH older vampire, (I know would never happen, but "what if") would that be wrong?

If it is allowed on national TV is it ok? Or in Cinemas?