TOS Update #3

[jennifer]

Preface

Hi there, my name is jennifer and I am the other half of the amazing TOS tag team, sharing duties with qilin. I recently realized it had been much too long since our last update here; since we only get a few TOS requests per month, it's easy to slip off the radar entirely. So today I will present you with a summary of our goings-on for the past eleven months. I hope you will take a few moments to give it a readthrough and let us know in comments if you have any suggestions or concerns.

Marking Adult Content

We do not have a policy for judging adult content. Marking adult content is completely up to the discretion of the poster (or maintainers, in the case of a community). You may contact them and request that the content be screened appropriately, but if you complain to the TOS team, we will not intervene as long as no laws are being broken.

Maintainers of a community can override the poster's adult content setting on individual entries without having to change the default adult content level for the entire community. This is a feature Dreamwidth provides that other LJ-based sites do not!

Dealing With Spam

If you get spam comments, you don't need to open a support request. You need to delete them and click the checkbox for "Mark this comment as spam". This will send the spammer's info to the Antispam team, who will get the job done.

If you continue to receive spam comments on one particular URL (which, due to the nature of the spammers, is often the case), you can edit the security level on that entry to access-only. You also have the option of disabling anonymous comments in your journal or requiring them to use a CAPTCHA. This information is also available in the antispam FAQ.

Because we require an invite code or payment to create an account, we don't get much spam from logged in users. If you find some, though, again, delete and mark as spam for comments. If you find a journal whose entries consist entirely of spam messages, or if you receive spam in the form of unsolicited advertisements in your Dreamwidth inbox, that can be reported to us for investigation and possible suspension.

Compromised Accounts

If you discover an entry in your journal that you did not post, or see unfamiliar information on the Manage Login Sessions page for your account, you should change your password immediately in order to regain control of the account. However, if you think you know who did it and ask us to suspend them from the site, we won't be able to do that. An IP address alone isn't sufficient proof, since we have no way of knowing who was sitting at the keyboard at the time, and in many households, more than one computer can share the same external IP address.

In order to safeguard your account security, we recommend that you choose a password that can't be easily guessed, enable the login checkbox for binding your login cookie to your IP address, and don't log in from any computer that isn't yours. Insecure computers may have keyloggers or other spyware installed that could hijack your user/password info.

Linking To Infringing Content

Our copyright compliance policy states that if there is allegedly infringing content being hosted on Dreamwidth, we must be contacted by the copyright holders according to the stipulations of the DMCA.

A very small number of the infringement complaints we have received have met these requirements. The majority of them refer to content that is only being linked from our site. If we are contacted by the copyright holders, we refer them to the owner of the site that is hosting the disputed content. If we are contacted by a concerned third party, we tell them that we will only take action at the behest of the copyright holder.

We've also received a subset of infringement reports from bloggers who are disturbed to see their content syndicated on Dreamwidth. Our standard response in that case is to explain that we only keep the content for two weeks, and to let them know how to turn off their feed if they don't want to be syndicated. We will not delete the syndicated account on Dreamwidth. Hopefully the new bare bones S2 style for syndicated accounts will cut down on these complaints, since it will only show the entry titles if the viewer is not logged in.

What Do You Need From Us?

We've been discussing updating the TOS FAQ. We actually prefer to receive support requests via the website if possible, since that gives us more information we can use to help you than an email address does. We should probably also link to the FAQ on banning commenters, since the majority of non-DMCA requests we receive are harassment complaints. What would you like to see?

Also, as a followup to previous updates, the problem that was keeping dw_tos_feed from updating will be fixed with the next code push. The TOS document hasn't been updated in that time, so no one missed anything.

Comments

[azurelunatic]

Don't forget assuring control of your email address if you suspect your account has been compromised -- if an attacker has pwned your email address, I believe they can reset your password on you.

[kake]

A very small number of the infringement complaints we have received have met these requirements. The majority of them refer to content that is only being linked from our site. If we are contacted by the copyright holders, we refer them to the owner of the site that is hosting the disputed content.

So does this mean that if, for example, Person X has a photo on e.g. Flickr that's All Rights Reserved, and Person Y embeds that photo into their journal, then Person X has no recourse, since the photo isn't actually hosted on Dreamwidth? Or am I misreading this?

[noxie]

+1 It has me a bit confused, too. If I was the copyright holder, I might not be amused. But I understand where you're coming from. Other than that, everything you wrote looks good to me.

[denise]

If Person X has control of the image on the remote site, and it's being remote-loaded on DW by Person Y, Person X could contact us and we'd take action to remove it (assuming Person X made the copyright complaint in the proper format, of course!) We haven't gotten any situations like those, though; it's all been Person Y uploading Person X's image to webspace they control, and Person X wanting us to remove the image, which we couldn't, as we don't control Person Y's webspace, and even if we did anything to make the DW entry go away, it wouldn't change the fact that Person Y is still (allegedly) violating Person X's copyright. (ie, they could then repost the entry containing the image, or post it somewhere else, etc)

[kake]

If Person X has control of the image on the remote site, and it's being remote-loaded on DW by Person Y, Person X could contact us and we'd take action to remove it (assuming Person X made the copyright complaint in the proper format, of course!)

This is the situation I had in mind, yes — thank you for the reassurance!

[chris]

Slightly winding story: a friend recently criticised Livejournal's Abuse team, of years ago, and suggested that "...the Abuse department be more open and accountable, to the extent of publishing (suitably-anonymised) case notes explaining its actions". Aha, I thought, at least in the years since then, Dreamwidth's ToS team has done just that. Now I've investigated, you have done that, but it looks like it hasn't happened for a couple of years. Any particular reason why you've stopped, other than the fact that nobody actually responded to your "What would you like to see?" request in this posting to suggest that there was anything that people would like to see?

[jennifer]

For a while, nothing interesting was happening - we were only getting a handful of requests a month of the same sort we'd covered previously. Things have picked up a bit more recently, so you're right, we should post an update. Thanks for the reminder. :)

[denise]

And in addition to what jennifer said, there's a definite element of "it's the same four situations over and over again". :)

(Also, the collection has to be done manually, and manual things with large elements of tediousness tend to get procrastinated on. Heh.)