Livejournal user agreement updated

[cellio]

I still have an LJ account, though I stopped posting there after they changed the terms of service in problematic ways. Today I got email notifying me of an update to those terms of service, so out of curiosity I took a look. That's the new version; I didn't look for the old one or attempt a direct comparison. A few things jumped out on a quick skim (conclusion: still not using them):

• Section 6.1 says this about termination of accounts: "The Administration reserves the right to delete Account and Blog if User did not access the Account or the access was restricted for more than 2 years due to a breach hereof." They don't say what "access" means, but if you left LJ and thought your posts would remain until you removed them, you might want to check into that, or log in once a year, or something.

• Section 7.4, about blogs and comments, says that the commenter and blog owner are "jointly and severally liable" for their content. (If someone posts a problematic comment and you don't nuke it, you're complicit.) The "severally" part means the parties can be sued independently, or at least that's what it means under US law as I understand it. Russian law? No idea. I bring this up because in the next section, about communities (shared blogs), it says in 8.4 that a poster or commenter and the community owner are "subsidiarily liable" with respect to the content. I don't know what that means or why it's different from the blog case.

• Section 9.2.6 says that users may not "without the Administration’s special permit, use automatic scripts (bots, crawlers etc.) to collect information from the Service and/or to interact with the Service". Do they mean userscripts too? Other clients? That cron job that posts a quote of the day?

• Users may also not "post advertising and/or political solicitation materials" without permission, but these terms are not defined. Are you allowed to pitch your new book (with purchase link)? Link to the feedback form for legislation that's out for public comment? I assume the purpose is to support the goals of the Russian government, but the language is more expansive.

• Section 11.3 (under liability) says (my emphasis): "Please note that in accordance with the Russian Federation Act No. 2300-1 dated February 7, 1992, the provisions of the said act related to consumer rights protection do not apply to the relationship between the Administration and Users as the Service is provided for free." I paid for a permanent account. On the other hand, they also say (in 10.6): "The Administration may at its own discretion and without User’s prior notice supplement, reduce or otherwise modify any Service function and it’ [sic] procedures." So I guess they have cancelled or can cancel permanent accounts at will.

• As with the 2016 change, the English-language document they post isn't legally relevant in any way; you are agreeing to the Russian-language TOS. Can you read Russian?

Comments

[cellio]

Hello and welcome.

I don't know the likely consequences either. If I never plan to travel to Russia, what can they do to me here? Maybe nothing, but I don't know how that stuff works so I have to take their language as at least some sort of declaration of intent.

There's also the question of "who am I and why do I matter?". I'm a nobody; I should be safe, right? But maybe I've made some comment sometime during my 16 years on LJ that somebody now in power doesn't like, or maybe one of my commenters did, and who needs the potential grief? Ideological crusades and witch-hunts are real hazards, socially if not legally, and for online content they can be automated. Why expose myself to it for a service I don't even use any more? So for me this is a reminder, a wake-up call perhaps, to go in there and finish cleaning up and closing it down.

I do think Dreamwidth is better in this regard. They've been open where LJ wasn't, and so this seemed an obvious place to migrate to. So long as you're using someone else's services (and hosting) you're at some risk of hassles, but DW seems to treat people decently. LJ reneged on promises made to holders of paid accounts; I haven't seen that at DW.

The Internet is ever-changing, and companies and services that use it also.

[luscious_purple]

I wouldn't be surprised if I am on Russia's excrement list just for posting this icon. :-)

Seriously, I don't ever expect to set foot in Russia, so I'm not going to worry about it. Why would I go there when I bear the surname of a well-known Lithuanian nationalist historian?

[matrixmann]

Dreamwidth literally is an island of freedom compared to ALL social networks around the net.
If they got more popular, and some potentially harmful groups took refugee in here, I think that would also change for sure.

I can only speak from what has been in the headlines in the recent years and how much there have been politicians calling for whatever kind of crap, hostile to the structures of the internet and revealing how fully they lack understanding of the net as it was created and operates in technical terms.
Currently there's this agenda around gere to do anything about Telegram - from prohibiting using the service for German citizens to "hacking" the phones and devices of German citizens who use it to reveal their identities and punish them for crap they have written/called for on Telegram (this mainly aims at the scene of the anti-Corona measure protests as well as militant far-righters and such willing to resort to violence).
But similar things are on the tab for Twitter for long (well, maybe except the hacking thing as this is a special feature of Telegram - protecting the identity of its users via encryption) because a lot of death threats and calls for violence and sexual harrassment in context with political/social opinions happen through it.
So, the threat of suffering any lawsuit for anything you have once posted, whether meant flippant or seriously, I see it's always there. On all other platforms too.
And I don't guess that Russia has any lesser of these problems than all the other countries around the world. It's a global downward spiral of peoples' behavior.
And, as soon as platforms get more popular, countries themselves are going to force them to implement certain policies or ways to handle particular things, if they want to continue operating. It's the states' way of trying to get control over what happens in the internet.

So, with seeing that swelling over the years here, I sometimes scratch my head over what (mostly US-)people complain about if something over at LJ is taken into the TOS that they find potentially limiting to their activities. This threat is present all the time meanwhile if you do anything else on the internet except just consuming and shutting your mouth/never say anything.
This is, so to say, "the legal standard" by now.
You've got to hope that no-one spots you and takes offense... (And sometimes it seems like there are people out there who you suspect to do that professionally for money - to be offended.)
And sometimes it seems like law doesn't even care about old or new content, if the one who takes offense of a content is incapable to read correctly.