LJ tricks

I don't know if it's connected to the deletions, but thamiris's journal showed up on my "manage friends" as gone -- no userinfo, no link. ETA: In comments, corbeaun reports that it was still visible, but by unfriending the journal and attempting to refriend she got the suspended/purged/deleted message.

Boy, do I not want to leave LJ. But it's looking likelier every day.

Law like love

Over the years I've seen a number of fan fiction/copyright debates, and (as with most ideological disputes) people's convictions about fan fiction's legality correlate strongly, but not perfectly, with their convictions about its morality. But there's always a set of fan writers & readers who say, often without investigating the subject much, "I know it's illegal but it shouldn't be," and I assume some on the other side who say the opposite, though I don't hang out with them.

The exact same thing happens with discussions of art & fiction featuring underage sex. And here, frankly, we're on firmer ground than with fan fiction & copyright, since there aren't any litigated cases on fan fiction. Depictions that aren't pictures or video of actual minors are judged by the standards for obscenity, not child porn. It is true that the moral panic doesn't distinguish between those, so what the law actually says is not the end of the matter. It is also true that a given piece of fan art could be obscene (writing is much less likely to be so, though it's not legally impossible), just as a given fan story could infringe. The reason lawyers give unsatisfactory answers to reasonable questions is often that the truest answer is "it depends." Moreover, there are of course a huge number of things it's immoral but not illegal to do or say; citizens must populate that set for themselves, whether in communities or as a matter of individual choice.

I'll leave you with the Auden poem.

And now for something completely different

Choice phrases from the opinion I've been reading -- and FYI, these are legal arguments on which millions of dollars turn:

“‘Superboy’ is merely ‘Superman’ in smaller tights.”

“I cannot accept defendants view that Superboy was in reality Superman.... Superboy was a separate and distinct entity.”

Siegel v. Time Warner Inc., 2007 WL 2172822 (C.D.Cal.)

I love my job.