The Fandom vs Six Apart trainwreck

[matgb]

Briefly, for obvious reasons I've been busy and not following too closely last few days, but on the most recent news I concur win demiurgent (Eric Burns of websnark). I've said a few times here and elsewhere that while the law itself in the US is fairly clear, there are grey areas that will need a test case; where does the boundary lie? One thing I'm sure of, Eric:

Six Apart doesn't want this to be a test case. But I promise you fanfiction communities really don't want this as a test case.

Because while 6A may have broken Californian consumer law (really, not my field), doing this:

They stated that they had received a number of complaints, and that they were contacting Six Apart to try and act as a liason between the unhappy consumers and the company. He did say that he would be contacting me, should Six Apart fail to respond, and that they may need me to provide further information "for legal action against this company by our office on behalf of the consumers".

Almost certainly going to cause more trouble than it solves. Legal spotlight, front and centre, on Lj & 6A. Therefore to include child porn allegations, copyright infringements, etc. The CA AG may not go that way, but it'll get publicity, and other lawyers.

Read the comments of that IJ post; the person who's started it has NO IDEA that this could cause other issues. Houston? We have a problem...

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Lovely lunch now finished, back to work...

Comments

[liz-marcs.livejournal.com]

Aaaaaa-men. I'm in the so stupid it burns camp when it comes to that letter.

Given the current legal climate in the U.S. where even legitimate uses of copyrighted material (i.e., fair use) is getting constantly squeezed, I don't want to imagine what could happen if someone looked too closely at fandom, because there's no guarantee we could win. And you know people would focus on the real underbelly parts of it.

[matgb]

Aye, reading through so much of the commentary, and the massive sense of entitlement/ "we-are-doing-no-wrong" attitude is amazing—I pretty much believe that fandom should be able to do what it likes in a non-profit manner, but the law disagrees. Ah well.

Someone, soon, is going to get their fingers burnt, then some of the screechy monkeys will see just why 6A is being (overly) cautious. If 6A could just keep a consistent PR approach they might do so much better as well.

(catching up on older comments, been busy)