Where's Waldo Kumimonster?

[lifted from ego_assassin] If you haven't heard the news yet, kumimonster has been deleted/suspended as part of the fallout from the recent argument between her and renedeparade. To get details and updates on this situation, and to show your support for Kumi please check out kumicorps.

Yeah, it's LJ drama, but the larger question of who owns what, how much control a person has over their own words' presentation is a legitimate and interesting one. Reading rené's LJ posts, it's clear his understanding of copyright is rooted in the print-era understanding of copyright; a backward-looking understanding which the worst parts of the DMCA attempt to reinforce legally which can no longer be protected physically. Claiming that the text you leave in someone else's journal is "yours" seems similar to blurting out something regrettable in public, then trying to cover it up by saying that it was a performance, and re-airing the footage of it is forbidden under copyright.

It's hard to know what LJ's ToS involves for a person's journal; I assume the anything we write in our journal is under our own copyright, but my assumption is that anyone who leaves a comment in my journal is effectively having a conversation with me "in my house," and is giving me leave to at least quote there statement in my own responses. When I leave a comment in their LJ, I try to act as though I'm in "their house," and would be hard-pressed to leave any comment from which I'd need to edit or backpedal. If one missteps, creates a faux pas, or realizes that they need to extricate themselves from a situation, it's common netiquette to at least leave the conversation intact so people can see what was being discussed. This is not a legal issue so much as a moral one, and also respecting fellow participants in the conversation.

I'm of the mind that, as a paying customer (I'm assuming KM's account is a Paid one), her LJ is definitely "her house," and what happens in it is her business. René deleting his comments as a means of withdrawing from the conversation seems less productive, honest, and forthcoming than simply saying, "I'm outtie" at the end of the thread and just walking away from it. He says that his grandma told him that the smarter conversant knows when to step aside, and he probably thinks that's what he did. Instead it looks like he just wants to take his ball and go home.