Didn't see it coming :/

[logovo]

The new twist on Dreamwidth drama is over comment importing?

::headdesk::

I'm very surprised that people are objecting to having their comments duplicated on another service. It makes no sense to me, at all. But I have to remember that a handful of posts on the subject (check out metafandom's delicious is you're curious) is just that, a few people saying that duplicating their comments on Dreamwidth is a violation of their copyright.

I get that fandom is tricky when deciding when it's OK to mess with someone else's property, that it's OK to take from commercial enterprises but not OK to take from each other within fandom. But still - comments? Really?

ETA: I just read this.

AFAIK, the plan is that anyone will be able to get all comments of theirs that have been imported to DW permanently screened.

(The option's not available yet, but will be as soon as they've coded it, which should be soon.)

You won't have to go through and find all the individual comments or anything like that; it'll just be bang, everything belonging to you gets screened in one fell swoop (ETA: it will also apply pre-emptively to any comments of yours that get imported in the future).

(Which, I will note, is something you can't do with your comments on LJ.)

The comments will still be there, but won't ever be visible to anyone except you and the journal owner, which effectively makes it no different from a private back-up like LJArchive.

Now that might make everyone happy :D

Comments

[gwen]

I wish I could be surprised. There were a few heated topics on the subject in the mailing list before DW went into open beta. It's just a stupid comment. Who in their right mind would care? Yes right when I stated that Jensen Ackles was a hotty mchotty pants in my friends journal I must protect my copyright and not allow them to move that comment else where.

[logovo]

It's obvious some people care, but I would have never thought this was important enough to generate so much conversation. I still don't actually and think what is really going on is the whole anti-DW thing, it being possibly a big migration (relative to previous ones) and the code thing. ::sigh:: The whole code thing and hurt feelings, now that I get to some degree.

[auburn]

Now that might make everyone happy

Uhm. No. I imported my journal to DW. If someone screens all their comments in my DW journal that were public on LJ and can still be seen, copied, screencapped and replied to over there, they're acting in a way that normally gets someone cited over at fandom_wank. I'll end up ticked off and will probably decide in a righteous snit that I don't need to deal with someone so petty and drop them. Which might make them happy, of course. My point being the solution proposed would not please others -- and probably not the current crop of whiners either, who just don't like DW.

[logovo]

Hah! Once again I'm being overly optimistic I see. If someone did that in my DW account... see, I can't even imagine anyone in my flist wanting to do that! Until recently I was flocked, so all the comments are from people that I know to some degree.

[anita]

Are you telling me that are people complaining because their comments on LJ cannot appear in another journal?

[logovo]

They're complaining that their comments are appearing in journals that have migrated into DW. So they don't want what they said to appear here.

[anita]

Me expresé mal! Jajaja. No entiendo porque se quejan. No entiendo cual es la diferencia entre un journal u otro. Si uno mantiene un journal friend only, difícilmente lo abra en otro servidor, que se yo.

[logovo]

Es que no quieren contribuir al exito de DW y les molesta que su nombre salga por aca. Hay muchos resentimientos en algunas partes de fandom, cosas que han venido evolucionando, pero que no comprendo bien.

::suspiro::

[slapchop]

Mostly I'm amazed at how proud she is of being such a whiny brat.

[logovo]

I don't think she understands how badly she comes across. I mean, it feels petty, you know?

[bell]

I hadn't considered the question of the issues of transferring comments without the person's permission until those posts showed up, but with some thought, it's a legitimate concern. One, because people might not have realized that their words would move (or last?), and now that it's happening, they're upset. And two, having their names & words on a site they don't want to be associated it could be seen as a form of support despite themselves. So I sympathize with that.

On the other hand, weren't they aware that by posting comments, they were more or less releasing their words into the wild? Once you put something on the internet, you better expect to be quoted, plagiarized, mocked, copied without permission... it's how the internet works. (Sadly?)

The DW solution seems like the best possible one, though I have to admit, it seems a little unfair to ask people to come in and do the work of erasing themselves from a site. It reminds me of Fandom History-- I had to jump through hoops to request to have the entry on me deleted, first in English, and then in Spanish. [I objected to being on the site because: a) I don't support Fandom History; b) it was a bot-generated entry based on my ff.net stories.]

[logovo]

I'm finding myself very irritated by the whole thing! Must. Calm. Down. Self.

::deep breath::

Well, comments have been moved before, archived and all that, it's now only with it being made so easy to DW members that it's getting people upset. I... oh, I can't really sympathize that much with them. To me it seems like they expect the illusion they have of how the internet works to be how the rest of LJ users use their journals. Being unaware of how things generally work online should not mean one gets to dictate (retroactively even!) how the rest of the community acts.

I could maybe get into the fact that we're a community that uses copyrighted material without permission all the time, how to my eyes it gets very hypocritical when fans want to control every aspect of their online life, but that's beside the point. In the end we're talking about etiquette, and I hope that the majority comes to the conclusion that an LJ is made up of posts and comments, and that once you post a comment you don't get to dictate where the information is stored. I get that we all agree that creators decide where they have their stuff archived, but comments are not whole creations by themselves and I can't get my head around how the fans having problems feel entitled to such degrees of control.

FH - oh yeah. Well, I have to say that they proved themselves to act in bad faith more than once, so to me it's not the same thing. But I do see your point.