Frivolous LJ Abuse Reports

Lol, TOS

Ban. Whine. Ban. Whine. Ad infinabusum

Any report to LJ Abuse that is made by someone other than an idiot defending their copyrighted icon of Sailor Moon screencaps.

Frivolous LJ Abuse Reports are considered to be a waste of time by basically everyone, regardless of the fact that they are invariably actual LJ TOS violations. They are worthless infractions because,

• They require some cognizance of the LJ TOS as a whole, since it consists of a list of individual terms stapled together. FLARs usually consist of combining two or more of them to 'invent' a rule.
• LJ Abuse is well aware that its document is a piece of shit, and are very ashamed of it. Instead of realising that you've found a gaping legal hole, they will ignore you and request that you report only icon thefts, or furry-bashing.

How Do I Report Frivolously?

Unfortunately LJ Abuse's draconian techniques dictate that only the person being infringed upon can report an infringement. What this means is that even if you discover someone is posting the entire collected works of Douglas Adams, it will still be a FLAR unless you can get Douglas Adams to email them. The key to understanding LJ Abuse treatment of the LJ TOS is to realise that they aren't interested in the terms of service - only not getting sued, and pie. If you can promise them pie then they might listen to your report.

You also have to cite the infringement - many communities such as metaquotes, and u_make_lj_suck exist only to infringe copyright. Whereas the former generally gets permission (though sometimes does not), the latter never does nor cites sources - and often posts are friends-locked so that the authors cannot ever see them. LJ Abuse have ruled that because the latter cites material anonymously that it does not count as harassment, and because the author is almost always completely unaware that people are stealing their stuff, a copyright infringement cannot be filed. According to rumors, these communities spend at least a $100 a year on pie.

Frivolous Reports

Real Names Make Me Break The Law

According to LJ TOS member conduct, LJ Users are required not to enable other people to break the TOS.

15. Allow usage by others in such a way as to violate LiveJournal.com's TOS;

This is intentionally left vague so that Livejournal can interpret it anyway they want to, depending on what time of the month it is. However, it clearly runs afoul of an earlier rule:

1. Upload, post or otherwise transmit any content that is in LiveJournal.com's opinion... 
invasive to another's privacy (up to, but not excluding any address, email, phone number, 
or any other contact information with out the written consent of the owner of such information)...;

The Livejournal Abuse team has repeatedly ruled in the past that posting even the first name of a person (or even rhyming, if they think someone could guess!), especially in the case of common knowledge, is an invasion of their privacy - regardless of whether the information is publicly available.

By applying conduct rule #15 to rule #1 we can - without even exercising anything but common sense - discover that posting your own name, phone number, address etc, implicitly allows others to break the LJ TOS : because even though you, yourself, have made this information publicly available, LJ Abuse deems it to be an infraction for anyone else to use that information without your express, written permission.