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Layout note:
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General Policies:

This blog will be using radicalized language, however, this does NOT mean radicalized thought is tolerated or approved. You are free to disagree, but there will be zero tolerance for impolite behavior. The First Amendment protects both your right and mine to express politicized thought without government oversight. It does not protect you (or me) from getting kicked out of a privately owned internet domain (AKA dreamwidth.org). Hateful speech, confrontational attitudes, spamming, and/or trolling will result in a ban from this blog (

cashew) at my discretion. Using alt-right rhetoric in any comments associated with this blog will result in a ban immediately. (Consult this series of videos to determine what I consider alt-right rhetoric.)

This is your only warning.

Regarding Copyright

I have good faith belief that all materials hosted on this blog which are not licensed under the Creative Commons License fall within either a) de minimis or b) the fair use provision of the copyright regulations, as defined in 17 USC 107. If you disagree that this is fair use, you must work directly with me, through legally viable channels, to resolve the dispute.

Hotlinking:
Here is a comprehensive explanation for why hotlinking does not violate copyright. Furthermore, there is now court precedence (Perfect 10, Inc. v. Amazon.com, Inc. and A9.com Inc. and Google Inc.) that clarified the determination of "display" as it pertains to copyright: the website on which content is stored and by which it is served directly to a user, not the website that in-line links to it, is the website that 'displays' the content. Therefore, hotlinks do not infringe on copyright.

Because court precedence have deemed thumbnails to be a violation of copyright (Perfect 10 v. Google), while hotlink references are compatible with copyright law, for my own protection and to adhere to Dreamwidth Studios' ToS, I will use hotlinks when referencing materials made available online. If you do not wish to see your works referenced via hotlinks, please consider cutting off the hotlink accessibility on your website. (If you need help, here is an article that teaches you how to shut down hotlink requests to your server.) If your concern is about bandwidth loss, consider licensing your materials using one of the Creative Commons licenses or provide a thumbnail for reference purposes. Although effort will be made to properly attribute materials referenced in this blog, if the material is found on public hosting sites (such as the likes of Flickr, Giphy, Imgur, Tinypic, Tumblr, etc.), it is up to those sites to restrict access to the material.

Fan Art:
If you are challenging me on the copyright of your fan art, please consult this resource on IP law. Furthermore, my derivative use of your fan art without permission is no different from your derivative use of copyrighted characters in fan art without permission. If you falsely file a DMCA notice with Dreamwidth, I will exercise my right to file a counter-notice.

I firmly believe that fan works are an expression of love for the original copyrighted material and should not be censored. However, I also understand that fan works lives and dies by the grace of the original copyright owner's tolerance of fan activity. Behavior that pushes the original owners' tolerance is deeply frowned upon. Furthermore, I will always respect the copyright owner's request to remove/stop a fan work. I will not tolerate fan artists who try to falsely claim copyright over their fan works, because I understand these works are not protected by copyright law.

Regarding Perceived Conduct Violations

Content removal is subject to Dreamwidth's sole discretion. However, Dreamwidth has a history of defending free speech when feasible. To quote Dreamwidth administrator

denise:

[W]e try to strike a balance between stopping the worst of the terrible things people can do to each other on the internet and letting people post without having to worry that their accounts are going to be closed because someone objected to the content they were posting. We try to err on the side of permissiveness as much as possible, though. That means you may find people on Dreamwidth posting horrible opinions or beliefs, but it also means you can be confident you don't have to censor yourself.

If you try to mobilize your followers to submit violation reports in an attempt shut me down, you will be in violation of Dreamwidth's anti-harrassment policies. Consider your actions very, very carefully. As per denise in her welcome post:

It'll probably be clearer if I give you a sliding scale of Okay vs Not Okay. I'll use "being a cat owner" as the example, not to trivialize the sort of beliefs that neo-Nazis espouse but because nobody wants to keep hearing about Nazis.[...]

Saying, in a journal post or in your profile, that you're a cat owner (self-identifying as a Thing): okay

Saying, in a post to your own journal, stuff like "I don't know why people look down on cat owners so much; they're right, life is better with fur everywhere" (agreeing with some/all of the beliefs of Thing, without any encouragement to act upon them): okay

Saying, in a post to your own journal or in a comment to someone else's post, "Everyone should have a cat. Who's with me in our plan to spread cats everywhere?" (organizing, inciting, or trying to recruit others to do something other than just talk about Thing in their own space): Not Okay, will have penalties ranging from suspension of the entry/comment to suspension of the account entirely based on how many times we've had to talk to the person about it/how much of their account is devoted to it

Commenting to someone else's journal, "FUCK YOU DOG LOVER CATS FOREVER" (contacting someone to harass them on the basis of the commenter's Thingitry): depends on what percentage of the account's comments are Thingitry-based harassment and what aren't, but generally, the first-line solution to getting unwanted comments is to ban the user from contacting you and see if they escalate to inciting others to harass you on their behalf (in which case, see previous step) or create alternate accounts to get around the ban (which is a straight-up ToS violation, although we usually deliver one warning before starting to suspend accounts over it).

— Welcome to Dreamwidth, Tumblr folks!

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Attribution & Licenses

For an archive of fannish activities, head over to mozi.