I admire the clarity and the tenor.

It would be very painful but not really effective to just boycott LJ; but to vent out this incident, making it more than a family squabble, would help. I am ready to sign the petition and a letter to the outside press.

Another thought: Why you refer to LJ as a publisher? It is not a media institution. It is a provider, just as mail, cable etc. As such, it hardly has rights to censure content, not being and indisputably and narrow defined infraction. That's my not really informed opinion.

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::Why you refer to LJ as a publisher? It is not a media institution. It is a provider, just as mail, cable etc. As such, it hardly has rights to censure content, not being and indisputably and narrow defined infraction. That's my not really informed opinion.
Любопытно. Нужно будет вечером попросить Ноэля поискать какие нибудь комменты по этому поводу.
Если ЖЖ - это провайдер, то может быть можно с ними обсудить легитимность их позиции "редактора содержания без объяснения причин".
Ага, нужно только письмо то написать, я могу попробовать начать,но нужно, конечно, отредактировать.

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I think that the "provider" plea is a cop-out in almost every instance that it is used. And it's best not to stretch analogies in any case. I see very little functional resemblance between the postal mail system and email, for instance. Between either system and cable television, also nothing of consequence. And between any one of these and a service like LJ, zero.
LiveJournal is publishing your content. You may be the author, editor, and owner of the content, but they are the publisher. I am sure that they would be glad *not* to have an "abuse" team, and to allow anyone to post any content at all. But the US and other legal systems put certain obligations on them. Their terms of service document is their strategy for coercing you to help them to meet their legal obligations. The degree of sensitivity with which that policy is written and enforced is going to be determined by two things, aside from the legal requirements: (1) the existing attitude at the organization, developed or undeveloped as it may be; and (2) the pressure that you as a community of users place upon them.
I agree: "family squabble" is not the tone you want to achieve here. I think that the "abuse_lj_abuse" group unfortunately looks like that, to some extent. The point is not to "fight" with the LJ management, but to raise their consciousness. I am advocating an aggressive approach to that, however: dramatizing the issues at stake, even if this particular case does not involve life and death. I believe this is important, because I don't index the "value" of liberties based solely on their immediate, incidental closeness to -- or distance from -- tangible, physically altering forces.
In other words, it's worth taking this on now, in a very serious way, just as it would have been worth it for Russians worldwide to take on the Russian government's attacks on the briefly free Russian media *before* the fight became hopeless. You're dealing with a company here, not a government, but this company is behaving as a de facto government. They can either move more in the direction of "of the people, by the people, for the people", or in another direction. But it is unlikely that they won't move at all, with or without your influence.

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I disagree. LJ would be a publisher, if it would make my documents public without my participation, beside the creation and consent. In reality, the process of making anything public makes the user the main and the only actor. His intention is the only driving force. The LJ role is purely technical, which makes it a provider.

And as such it cannot be responsible for the content it is entrusted with. Let's suppose a bank makes me sign agreement by which it has rights at any moment and on its discretion to cancel my account and burn the money. What would you say to that?

I think the right thing to do would be to discredit TOS Termination clause in its present form.

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