Administrative rant and the re-writing of history

[ladyvyola]

Jeesh, don't check out LJ for a weekend and you have no idea what's going on.

(I was building a computer desk, okay? It's five feet long and two and a half feet deep and it's frickin' huge and I love it and it took me all weekend so my computer was unplugged and in the corner out of the way the whole time.)

So what the heck erupted on sv_icons while I was away? The thread in question seems to have been deleted, which pisses me off no end. My feeling is: if it's your personal journal, go ahead and revise all you want. Delete any comments you've made in other journals. But an entry into a community becomes part of its history -- good, bad or indifferent. And removing an entry erases part of that history. It removes all the comments, too, which bothers me. If a tempest was stirred up, maybe it was something the community needed to address.

And yeah, it annoys me on ego grounds -- I created that community and feel proprietary toward it. Something happened and I can't see what it was; I can only read around it in other journals. I feel responsible for keeping sv_icons on a proper keel; if (speaking hypothetically) things ever got very contentous and abusive, I might have to exert admin privileges and I could not do that in a fair manner without all the facts.

(also posted in sv_icons)

Comments

[linabean.livejournal.com]

Here's my version of what happened: Miss Windy posted a few icons she'd made, including one she'd made out of a photomanip made by someone else, and she hadn't gotten the other person's permission to use the photomanip. Some people pointed out she should get permission for using other people's fanart first, and Miss Windy pointed out that that was pretty inconsistent with people obviously feeling free to use other legally protected art to make icons without permission, such as a professional photographer's work.

Some other people, including me, posited that there isn't a legal difference, but it has to do with standards of conduct within fandom--no one's going to assume that a fan who displays a professional photo of an actor is the one who took the photo, but a fan who offers up a piece of fanart will implicitly get the credit. Miss Windy did provide a link to a credit and a link to the fanartist (it wasn't in the original post but added as a comment, but I don't know of anyone who got the impression that she was trying to hide who'd created the art). However, the artist hadn't given permission for her art to be released as an icon that wouldn't have anything on it that identified her as the creator. This matters within fandom because a person's fannish output determines her identity in fandom. (Not all of that might have gotten said quite so explicitly--some of it may have been what I was going to say in a reply before the thread got deleted. But I think someone could conclude that from what was actually written.)

The tone of the discussion, though, was more heated than that. There were personality conflicts, and several people's attitudes were doubtlessly influenced by the history of other dust-ups. And some people attributed attitudes to the people they disagreed with, saying or implying things like "if you don't see why this is important, you must not have been in fandom very long" or "you must not have ever spent a lot of time creating something you care about" and, on the other side, "if you think this is so important, you must not have a life." So that didn't really help.

I thought it was a pretty honest mistake to have made, really--there isn't a legal difference between using someone else's fanart and using the art of someone who's not in fandom. But I don't think Miss Windy did a very good job of backing off when she should have realized she'd made a mistake, and I don't think some of the people arguing with her did a good job of helping her understand, in a considerate way, why it was a mistake.

[yaycyb.livejournal.com]

That sounds about like my take on the matter as well, for what it's worth.

[kstanley.livejournal.com]

Yeah I saw a comment in someone's blog implying that something had happened. I guess this was it. Well I guess I'll make sure and be careful when using other people's stuff.