Lolz, right? The Internet is all about linking; it is one of the major reasons why it is a more powerful platform for communication than traditional print. Anyone who’s been on the Internet for more than a few minutes gets the hang of the fact that anyone can link to anyone without implying or intending affiliation. And while individual communities have developed etiquette about how and when to link to others’ content, then, in general, it is understood that publicly available content is fair game. It is, after all, publicly available. The right to link is rather like the right to point at a painting hung in a museum and say, “Look at that!”

When I first saw the headline (via MSN) about the potential illegality of linking, my first thought was that it was another version of the hoax about how the U.S. Post Office is going to charge 5¢ per email in an attempt to recoup lost revenue from the rise of electronic versus snail mail: Shrieky panic caused by the fact that the Internet still sometimes seems too good to be true as a platform for information and communication.

Unfortunately, this one can’t be filed away under Hoaxes and forgotten. When the judge refused to dismiss the case and after incurring six-figure legal fees, the small start-up was forced to cave to the law firm’s pressure and settled the case, agreeing to format any links to the firm’s site in a specific manner, as determined by the law firm.

While it’s not time to hit the panic button yet, this opens a scary-big can of worms. The original article sums it up best:

Paul Alan Levy of Public Citizen described the lawsuit as a “new entry in the contest for ‘grossest abuse of trademark law to suppress speech the plaintiff doesn’t like.’ “

Writer Wendy Davis goes on to note,

But in a larger sense, [law firm] Jones Day won. The firm gained control over how an online publisher builds hyperlinks. The actual change Jones Day wrought may be small, but it signals to companies that they can force sites to revise their linking styles by alleging trademark infringement. And Judge Darrah’s decision not to dismiss the suit signals that Web publishers may have to spend significant sums to deal with this kind of litigation.

Just like net neutrality, I see this as another sign of the squirming discomfort felt by those who are accustomed to buying gold-star treatment with their fat wallets. That doesn’t happen online. We are all, in theory, on equal ground here. With a domain name, a plot of Internet real estate, and a little bit of tech-savvy, my theoretical start-up Dawn’s Dusty Books could compete with giants like Barnes & Noble and Amazon. This isn’t true offline, where I can’t afford even a tiny shop on the back of a Carroll County strip mall. If something like this were to take hold, the burden it would place on small Internet outlets (like me!) would be insurmountable.

I hope that, should this sort of case ever come up again, it comes before a judge who might have used the Internet once or twice. (This judge, clearly, by his astounding ignorance of how the Internet works, never has.) Someone who will seal up this big bucket of worms with a nice red bow on top before little ways of privileging the financially elite online slowly bleeds dry those of us who can’t afford to bow and scrape to their every whim.

In slightly older news that is no less stupid-scary, Australia has finally figured out the answers to that thorny question of how to define child pornography.

As anyone who lived through the LiveJournal Strikethrough debacle of 2007 probably remembers, child pornography gets messy when one realizes that not all visual depictions of children intended for sexual gratification involve real children. What to do about squicky drawings of underage Harry Potter doing naughty things with Professor Snape? Our gut instinct often seems to say that such drawings could only be made by Bad People™ who, by their ready association in our minds with those who abuse real-actual-living-breathing children, deserve to be punished.

Well, those of you who rolled your eyes at Strikethrough and proclaimed, “Only on LiveJournal! Only in fandom! Only there could such idiocy take hold!” might be disappointed to learn that, a year-and-a-half later, you are proven wrong on that. The Supreme Court of New South Wales, Australia, recently affirmed that fictional images can count as child pornography. Yes, a major nation is waging a Strikethrough, only the penalties are criminal convictions, not getting booted from an Internet site. The case in question involved children from the television show The Simpsons engaging in sex acts, so it’s not even that these are visual depictions of children who might, somewhere in the world be real-actual-living-breathing children. No, this is Harry-and-Snape fake (without even the complicating existence of Daniel Radcliffe), and it is the same stupid-scary notion that drove Strikethrough.

William Saletan writes:

What’s happening to child pornography is what’s happening on the Internet and in software generally: Technology is blurring boundaries between action and thought, public and private, real and fake. … This gray area unnerves us, so we prosecute it. … I understand why we do this: We’re afraid that if we don’t prosecute cyber-perverts, they’ll move on to the real thing. But the danger runs both ways. How far will we extend felony prosecution into the realm of the private, the fake, and the abstract? If the Simpsons count as child pornography, what’s next?

The problem is that there are plenty of perverts who skipped cartoons straight to the “real thing.” And, in the economic crunch, as public safety budgets are being slashed to save states’ money, we’re going to be stretching thinner and thinner to apprehend people whose actions have lifelong consequences for their very real victims far beyond someone’s refined sensibilities being insulted by a naughty drawing of Bart Simpson. I know because, when I’m not being all heretical and stuff on the Internet, I work for a law enforcement agency. I see the amount of time, energy, and resources that goes into investigating child sex offense cases and apprehending offenders. Indeed, some of that time and energy is mine! Sometimes it seems there just aren’t enough hands to go around or enough hours in the day. Do we really want to devote fewer hands and less hours to the people hurting real kids in order to go after those whose idea of what makes attractive, funny, or sexy artwork might raise our eyebrows but, in the end, harms no one?

Furthermore, it is an insult to the victims of actual pedophiles to associate an injury done to them that may well last a lifetime with … drawings we don’t like? I don’t know about everyone else, but my outrage against child sex offenders originates with the harm done to the most vulnerable members of our society in the name of the sexual gratification of their abusers. It has nothing to do with aesthetics; it has nothing to do with thinking that something is icky or immoral but with harm done. Sorry Bart, but confusing the two is a slap in the face to the real victims of childhood sexual abuse.

Within fandom, still more LJ subscribers use the service as a fiction archive. One of the reasons that the Strikethrough incident hit fandom so hard was because entire large fandoms are almost entirely concentrated on LJ, having no privately managed fiction archives of their own.

So LJ is a confusing entity: part journal, part blog, part social networking service, and part archive. So where am I going with all this?

This blog exists, in part, because of the complexity of LiveJournal’s uses. When I acquired my LJ account back in March 2005, I used it as a journal. This was logical; it would be close to four months yet before I made my first LJ “friend.” I occasionally posted story notes and canon research, mostly for my own benefit, and when I decided to share my novel Another Man’s Cage with the world, LJ seemed the safest place to do it: I was nervous about sharing my writing, so the level of control LJ afforded was appealing. I could control the comments and delete the whole thing if it proved to be a mistake.

Lo and behold, people liked my writing, so my LJ became a mixture of personal journal and story archive. Not long after, I discovered the joys of “meta,” writing about the broader social and cultural entity that is fandom. My stories and my meta spurred a lot of debate and, in my first years in fandom, this was an immense source of pride for me. I loved that so many of my LJ friends met new friends through my journal; I loved the level of discussion and debate that could be counted upon from my friends list. Many of my views on fandom were shaped–or changed entirely–by discussions held on my LJ.

The problem arose when people started bringing the same level of critique to the more personal journal posts that I still made. Over the space of a few months, I had five people become critical and negative about a journal post I’d made that I regarded as deeply personal and not subject to debate. Most of these people were close friends whom I’d known for years. Suddenly, posting to my LJ wasn’t as much fun. Even a frivolous vacation post, it seemed, had to be considered as deeply as some of the meta that I’d posted after taking weeks to write and revise it. I never knew when a comment I made on a personal experience would touch someone the wrong way and spark a controversy, and I honestly didn’t possess the strength on most days to deal with this in my personal life.

For many months, I barely posted to LJ. And I was angry: angry that people I’d counted as friends took it upon themselves to critique everything from my personal appearance to my religious views. Then I realized that I was angry with the wrong people.

My LJ experience was my fault, not theirs.

Once I realized this, the paralysis lifted a bit. My LJ went back to being a journal. I started this blog for the meta side of things and built a website for my stories. I was up front with my LJ friends list about the change and the reason for it, and people understood. But I still felt as though the problem was largely limited to me. Other people didn’t seem to have trouble switching between LJ’s various hats.

Lo and behold, recently on Metafandom, there is proof that I’m not alone. Cupidsbow write A Personal Schema for Meta, which–despite the daunting title–is actually an analysis of the bounds between public and private in LJ and how commenters do and should respond to each.

Public and private: to someone even passingly familiar with LJ, this is probably a no-brainer. There are four levels of security on LJ: public, private, and two types of friends-lock. Normal friends-lock allows only users you’ve chosen to list as a friend to view the post. A second type of friends-lock allows you to control who sees the post more narrowly than that, granting permission on an individual basis from your list of friends. Friends-locked posts are clearly marked as such both to the user and to viewers. So public versus private should be simple, right?

It would be, except for the fact that, as I noted earlier, the uses of LJ are infinitely complex. “Public” and “private” aren’t easily delineated. LiveJournal–in its name, its mission, and its history–carries with it the connotation of a personal safe space, a private journal. What many users would consider fair game on a blog they consider off-limits on their LJ, even if the post is question is technically “public.”

A few weeks ago, again on Metafandom,aryas_zehral wrote a post about discovering her LiveJournal had been mined for quotes used in a book and her uncertain feelings toward this. My initial response to the post was to become slightly irritated: The content in question was publicly available, so what gave her the impression that it was off-limits? So long as the author was within the bounds of fair use, what differed her LJ from any other public source?

But, as I think more about it, the experiences of aryas_zehral and Cupidsbow only highlight the complexity that is LiveJournal: Both assumed that a particular post–though public–was going to be understood by its audience as being somehow more personal than an ordinary blog post and that the audience would treat it accordingly. This is the exact same problem that I had on LJ. I assumed that my readers would simply know that a post, though public and able to be read by anyone, was somehow off-limits to the usual level of discussion and debate that I welcomed on my journal.

What’s the answer to all this? There is none, at least none that I have. Netiquette is inherently complex to start: It is a mode of human communication that strips us of our main perceptive faculties in communication–our faces, our voices–and expects us to still behave like humans. Yet, in most online environments, we still have the context in which we’re communicating to help us figure out what is proper and improper behavior. I would approach the same subject very differently on a Yahoo! group, an online classroom, and this blog. Most web environments come with a clear understanding of who can see what is being written, who controls it, and what is and is not acceptable, all of which are often formally spelled out in Terms of Service and site policies. With LJ, though, this is less clear. Each user makes LJ his or her own space, bound by his or her own rules. Look at a handful of LJ user profiles: Many users define their rules for everything from comments to friending. Rarely do similar sites and services encourage users to appropriate that level of personal control. Within that, the myriad uses of any single LJ–brought on, in part, by LJ’s own confusion about what kind of service it wants to be–leads to subjective impressions on how posts should be treated by readers. When a reader fails to discern this–and, to be fair, how is a reader supposed to?–this can lead to resentment, nastiness, and drama, all intended by no one.

As fandom shifts itself more and more into the public perception and as LJ continues evolving along the lines of FaceSpace, I expect this will increasingly become a pertinent issue. I suspect that many LJ users will eventually come to the conclusion that locks and disclaimers aren’t all bad. Regardless, it should be an interesting case study in social interaction in a world almost entirely devoid of social clues.