The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by dlnevins:

Shmuel, perhaps you're right about how the average LJ user will react when they discover corporate money comes with corporate strings. I rather suspect, though, that some of them will be upset if favorite LJ activites such as icon-making communities, fanfiction posting, and blogging freely about media properties are eventually eliminated because of advertiser pressures. It's a predictable outcome of growing corporate influence over the site, though.

(1) The seperation of those who pay for LJ services into a community of their own is artificial.

Not at all. Paid account holders stand in a different relationship to the company than free account holders do. We are customers, not simply users, and thus have different expectations of how responsive the site should be to our legitimate concerns.

(2) The existance of people willing to pay for additional features and/or to support the community in no way implies that all or most of them support requiring people to pay. Allowing unpaid or sponsored accounts might be seen as being in the best interests of paying LJ customers, giving them easy access to more content.

I repeat: either the users pay the bills, or advertisers do. The money's got to come from somewhere, and the more advertisers foot the costs, the more control they have over the site. Sponsored accounts (nevermind sponsored communities) are problematic for that very reason. Free users are less so; after all, paid account holders have been offsetting the costs of free user accounts for years now, and most paid account holders I know would be happy for that status quo to continue.

(3) One could as easily argue that there are already plenty of pay sites out there, and that the Internet doesn't need another one. As it stands, LJ is unique in its combination of its software, policies, servers, and userbase. There are others out there using the same code (with LJ's blessing; they deliberately opt for open-source and open standards when possible), but none with the same degree of popularity.

You said it yourself: LiveJournal is unique, and finding a reasonable substitute for it won't be easy. Migrating to another site also carries significant costs (chief of which is the disruption of those social relationships previously built up on LiveJournal). It's reasonable for users suddenly finding themselves facing those costs because of a change in company policy to attempt to get the policy change reversed before giving up and leaving.

I'm no blanket enemy of modern corporations, but neither do I see them as always benificient. They are thoroughly amoral machines for making money, and as such, they function very well. But just because the marketplace serves useful functions doesn't mean the ever-growing expansion of marketplace activites into other areas of the public sphere is also good thing. That's why so many users are upset at SixApart's choice; they see a community they created and loved being coopted, for what appears to be no good reason, and there may not be much they can do about it.

C. A. Bridges, you misunderstand me; I agree with your position. People ARE in fact complaining about a new company: SixApart, which purchased LiveJournal fairly recently. Prior to that purchase, LiveJournal paid its bills by selling paid journal accounts, extra features like additional icons, and merchandise such as t-shirts and coffee mugs. While most users may not have purchased these things, enough did to keep the company going (and growing). Because LiveJournal wasn't accepting advertising from corporate sponsors, they had to be responsive to what the actual users wanted from the site if they were to remain in business.

Now SixApart wants to change the business model to one in which advertisers foot a part of the bill. That may or may not be a reasonable business practice, but it can't be disputed that the shift in revenue sources may well cause a shift in the site dynamics that favors advertisers' desires over users'. It's a very reasonable concern, and one which the SixApart folks have not yet addressed in any meaningful way.

Noting on the net is free (appearances to the contrary). For a website to keep running, someone's got to pay the bills - and on a commercial site, that's going to be the customers. The question now is who does SixApart see as its primary customers: the current LiveJournal userbase, or the corporate sponsors? I (like most of the LiveJournal users who are worried about this development) suspect the answer's going to be the latter, and in that case, the site may no longer be very useful to us.

Shmuel, I wonder how many of those happy Plus-account users have ever stopped to consider the point Tavella (in comment #38) makes in her last paragraph. Very few, I'd wager. Plus accounts and sponsored communities are "free" in exactly the same way broadcast television is "free"; how will those users react when they discover that corporate interests actually control the discourse on what they thought was their own community?

Like anything else in life, you get only what you're willing to pay for. There are already plenty of other "free" (corporate-controlled) social network sites out there; the net doesn't need another one. Is actually requiring people to pay up front for the resources they wish to use such a radical business proposal these days? Certainly LJ's paid user community doesn't seem to think so!

Teresa, I only brought up the Rowling lawsuit as a counterpoint to the oft-made claim that permitting the existence of fanfiction poses some unique legal danger to the author of the original fiction. That it does pose a legal danger is clear (as Marion Zimmer Bradley's situation shows all too clearly). I just don't see how this is a unique danger. There's always a possibility that some author, somewhere, will read a new novel and say "Hey! That was my idea! I wrote it first!" and file a suit claiming prior ownership or copyright infringement. If the author of that new novel followed your advice and checked for any possible inadvertent infringement before the book was published, the chances of the suit succeeding are small - but the author will still be stuck defending himself in court, which is not fun. And there's always a small but non-zero chance he will in fact lose the suit, since it's possible for reasonable people to disagree on just how similar two creations can be and still remain noninfringing.

But I agree that's a tangential point to this overall discussion.

Regarding the Marion Zimmer Bradley incident: I think it's worth remembering that J. K. Rowling recently found herself in a similar situation, when a woman sued her claiming she had invented the term "Muggle" and Rowling had stolen the idea from her. Had Rowling lost that suit, it would have had a severe impact on her ability to continue publishing her work. The litigant in that situation was not a fanfic writer, though, but another professionally published author. I don't think there's any way a writer can ever be completely safe from the possibility of someone popping up and attempting to claim ownership over part of their work.

You might find these discussions of the Texas legislation interesting: http://www.leanleft.com/archives/2005/03/20/4103/
http://www.leanleft.com/archives/2005/03/22/4105/

The rationale for the Texas legislation is a bit more complicated than the blogosphere-at-large is making it out to be.

(Although that doesn't make the GOP's stance of Terri Schiavo any less hypocritical, for a myriad of other reasons.)

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