Lije Carpenter wrote: > I can tell you for my part, the > fact that the importer *does* allow for comment importation now confuses > me somewhat, since I've been told repeatedly and vehemently this evening > that copying other people's content without their explicit and advance > permission for each individual circumstance is evil, or at the very > least likely to lead to serious legal trouble.
The thing about the comment importer is that it attributes each comment to the LJ OpenID that initially made it. This means that if I had commented on your journal, and you imported it to DW, that my comment would appear as being made by the OpenID mysername.livejournal.com. The upshot of all that is that when I log into DW as mysername.livejournal.com I can then delete, edit, freeze, those comments just as I could have back on LJ. So yes, the importer does re-publish the comments, but it does so in a way that lets the original commenter un-publish them if they so desire. The sticking point there is that journal entries don't work the same way. They cannot currently be attributed to an OpenID and so there's no way to let the original poster from LiveJournal assert control of their original content on DreamWidth. Changing that requires a large technical upgrade that, if ever finished, will solve lots of issues at once, not least of which is the second-class status of OpenID users. Lije Carpenter wrote: > The lack of a ready technological solution to the apparent > community-continuity/individual-creator-rights dichotomy does not mean > that importation is something that shouldn't be worked on. Nor does it > call for people to belittle the folks looking to help their friends and > the people they maintain communities for make a happy, comfortable > transition to Dreamwidth. No, I haven't been around since Dreamwidth was > a mere gleam in Denise and Mark's eyes, nor do I work on LJ's staff. > Perhaps the viewpoint of the average lay user of LiveJournal is > something the development team could stand to hear a little more of, > because if Dreamwidth wants to be a viable business, the staff—both > volunteer and paid—are going to have to be prepared to play nicely with > a much wider user base than the code-jockeying power users who have been > around since LJ's infancy. Mark Smith wrote: >Denise didn't say that community imports WILL NOT happen, just that >they probably won't. If we (communal we here, not Denise and I >specifically) can figure out a way to address the >copyright/ownership/control issues satisfactorily, then we (Denise and >I) would be quite happy to make the importer work on communities. Nobody is saying that this won't ever be worked on. What they are saying is that both the legal and technical challenges are great and not likely to be resolved in the foreseeable future. First is the technical - can we do this? Can we make it so that journal entries can be attributed to an OpenID (and concurrently, can an OpenID account make a post to a community, or even its own personal journal)? Can we make it so that an OpenID user can find all the entries that may exist across multiple imported communities? Once that is solved we have to move on to the legal challenge - should we do it? Does posting an entry to a community equal consent to having that entry moved to wherever the community may reside, or does it only allow for publishing of that entry to the original place? For what it's worth, I'm a very average lay-user of LJ myself and I will raise five kinds of hell if I discover that my work has been re-published and moved beyond my control. I'm perfectly fine with having it re-published as long as I can maintain the same control over it as I enjoyed in its original format on LJ. -- Harold _______________________________________________ dw-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.dwscoalition.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dw-discuss
