Of possible impact

[anenko]

LJ is planning to delete inactive accounts (personal journals and communities which haven't been signed into for 24 months).

To quote:

Purging inactive accounts: One of the benefits of the work we've done to purge suspended accounts is that we will now be able to purge inactive journals and communities too--something you've been requesting for years! A journal is defined as inactive if it has not been logged into for 24 consecutive months. A community is defined as inactive if has not been updated for 24 consecutive months. Once an account is eligible to be purged for inactivity, the owner will be sent an email to alert them of the inactive status. The owner will then have two weeks to log into the journal or post to their community to prevent it from being deleted. If the owner does not log in or post, the account will be deleted and treated like any other deleted account (the owner will have 30 days to log in and undelete the account to prevent it from being purged).

I know this is definitely going to have an impact on some of the pages I've edited. Thoughts on how to deal with soon to be vanished references?

Comments

[morgandawn]

You can see if the page is archived on the WayBack Machine (some journals and communities are there). You can also quote more in depth rather than relying on a simple cite.

From there, it gets tricky. The Geocities Archive project took snapshots of single webpages. We had a discussion a few weeks back about WebCite (an academic citation method) here on Fanlore but didn't reach a consensus.

My thinking is for you to leave the site link as is, pull as much as you can reasonably justify into the text and take a screencap for later use/reference in case you need to go back and verify or adjust.

I found this discussion helpful:
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Wikiquote:Citing_sources#What_to_do_when_a_reference_link_.22goes_dead.22

PS. If the cite relies on a visual reference/link, then I'd follow Fanlore's existing fair use policy on images and include a thumbnail.

[quinfirefrorefiddle]

Doesn't this go directly against something they officially said before? I remember someone saying somewhere along the line that they would never delete any account that had even one post in it, just in case the person had died. (Yes, there's also the option for someone to contact the official LJ people and say, "Make it a memorial account" but that doesn't always happen.)

[ratcreature]

Yeah, they said they would never do this, but then they said they would never have ads too. Also I don't think gafiated counts as "dead" yet.

[morgandawn]

Another idea: create a list of cites that need editing/preserving on LJ and ask for help.

[cesperanza]

Hell; what about recs comms? Looks at ds_flashback worriedly!

[gblvr]

My understanding is that if a moderator logs in and makes some kind of minor change to the comm, it counts as an update.

[djonn]

This is perhaps more relevant to the OTW generally than to Fanlore in particular, but since the subject's been raised: I'm not sure LiveJournal can actually implement parts of that policy without committing actionable copyright violations.

Folk who remember GEnie and others of the pre-Web online communities may recall the term "compilation copyright" -- basically, this was the idea that the set of all messages in a given structural unit of the community (where LJ and DW have "journals", GEnie had "TOPics") constituted a unique collective work, in which somebody could assert a discrete copyright interest. In that instance, the "somebody" was mostly GEnie, because -- unlike almost anyone else at the time -- GEnie was legendary for archiving EVERYTHING, and being insanely organized about it.

Nowadays, though -- although I hasten to note that I'm no IP lawyer, nor indeed a lawyer at all -- I'd think there's a distinct case to be made that a given LJ constitutes a collective work whose "compilation copyright" rests with its creator and/or membership. Most TOSes grant the service provider the right to distribute content, but it's pretty well understood that they don't give service providers actual copyright interest.

That being the case, it seems to me that if you can demonstrate that a given LiveJournal constitutes a collective work in which there's a legitimate "compilation copyright" interest (RP communities, anyone?)....

....then if LJ unilaterally alters the collective work without getting all the requisite permissions, it's destroyed the value of the compilation copyright (and in at least some cases, may have destroyed the collective work itself), and ought to be liable for the infringement.

I really want to see a fan-friendly IP lawyer's take on this.

[elf]

if LJ unilaterally alters the collective work without getting all the requisite permissions, it's destroyed the value of the compilation copyright

I suspect there's no legal challenge there. You can't be nailed for copyright infringement for tearing pages out of a book before selling it. (For fraud, potentially, for offering to sell "Book Title" and instead selling "Book Title minus the pages with the smut.")

*Editing* content could get them in deep trouble; I can't see how deleting content would cause legal hassles.

Other than the "fraud: you promised your users X, and then reneged." But there's very little precedent for suing businesses for changing policies & screwing over users. (There is some; if it can be proven that permanent archives were part of their TOS, even if not listed on the TOS page, there's laws against changing that without notifying users. But that's a hard challenge to make.)

[djonn]

And that's just it: it seems to me that removing comments made by User X from a journal created and maintained by User Y looks to me like "editing" the collective work that is User Y's journal -- and as you say, editing content impermissibly seems likely to get them in deep trouble.

Using your analogy, it's the equivalent of tearing chapters out of some copies of the book after they sold a lot of copies of the original version. Which is itself an imperfect analogy, because that more or less describes what TSR had to do to its original Deities & Demigods role-playing rulebook; the distinction there is that TSR had included material to which it hadn't secured the necessary rights in the first place.

It's an interesting legal question, though as folk below have noted, LJ appears to have blinked in the face of its users' righteous wrath, such that it may not arise to anything like the degree initially feared.

[risha]

Just an FYI, though the discussion itself is still a worthy one, given that something like this could (will?) still happen in the future. LJ has backed down (or clarified?), and has specified that only inactive accounts without content (more than just a welcome post) will be purged. Of course, as of this moment it still sounds like we'd lose comments made in other journals by purged accounts - which would hit old RP communities hard, for one.

[facetofcathy]

See this post and this post linked from the first one for more information about how this is really going to go down.

If this is accurate, and it seems to be, RP journals will only be affected in the owner never made any posts in the journal itself--which may be common, I don't know.

Most of the comments that will be deleted are from suspended accounts and those comments are already invisible even to the journal owner where they were made.

As to what Fanlore should do when editors know content will disappear--a policy on when and how screencaps can be used seems to be in order. I've been a bit leary of the fact that an exception the rule about citing now-locked content via screencaps is buried in the Talk page for Racefai'09 since that decision was made.

[turlough]

It looks like only comments from suspended users will be deleted at all: http://soph.livejournal.com/206549.html?thread=832981#t832981

wiki committee response

[aethel]

I looked up that exception on the talk page and conferred with the other committee members. The decision on the talk page stands, and I've updated the Fanlore:Citation page to reflect this.

Here is the original wiki committee statement:

Wiki Committee response: After discussion, the committee has adopted the position that if something was initially public, then screencaps of that material are fine to include as long as nothing in the screencap otherwise violates policy. The key here is the expectation of privacy at the time the initial post was made/commented on -- if the post was originally open, there was no such expectation, and a retroactive friends-lock/removal doesn't change that. Care should be taken, as always, to present as many points of view on the issue/controversy as possible. Thus, if the screencap no longer represents the current position of the person represented, please take care to note their changed stance as well. - Melina 18:23, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

Re: wiki committee response

[facetofcathy]

That's excellent!

I think it's a good thing when the posted policies match the user's viewable reality.

[turlough]

It seems like it isn't as bad as we feared, at least not for now. This entry has more info, check the comments for info about the deleting of comments and comm entries.

[elf]

They edited the news entry to indicate that "inactive" accounts are those that haven't been logged into in 24 months, and have only one post--the private intro post that LJ automatically makes on account creation.

So there's some breathing time. But I do expect, in the next couple of years, another "we're clearing out all accounts not logged into in X months" announcement.

It'd be a good idea to look into archiving/downloading options for inactive journals.