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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023

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I could probably sue on the basis that it causes me reputational harm

How would it cause you reputational harm? If anything you'd be the victim of malicious fiction, and victimhood is a reputational benefit nowadays.

I don't necessarily agree that none of them should be.

Well I disagree. Fiction is fiction and thus automatically possesses a rightful presumption of being implicitly harmless (as it is, quite literally, unlike most important harms, not tangibly real) absent a more pressing justification than someone's discomfort over their depiction, whether it's because it's extra realistic looking (but again, still not actually tangibly real) or not.

I mean this is of course speaking in terms of abstract ideal legal policy. Strategically speaking, if you want to make deepfakes illegal in any sense and force those who want to see fake Pokimane or fake Emma Watson getting railed into the depths of the darknet where stuff like child porn also circulates, thus strengthening the entire enterprise of private and anonymous content contribution opposing the unjust power of the modern digital hegemony, then that's probably a win for people like me.

I said you should keep your sexual fantasies about your neighbor's underage daughter to yourself and not share them with her or her father, and your response is "Nuh uh, it's not illegal!"

Uhh no. My response actually was:

Maybe it becomes their business but that doesn't imply any obligation for the state to do anything on their behalf.

"Maybe it becomes their business" doesn't in any sense imply some overall objection to the principle of generally keeping such things to yourself on etiquette/behavioral grounds, and simply advancing the viewpoint that a certain behavior is not a concern of any formal power is not some blanket approval of it as ideal behavior in all contexts (many such cases of people unfortunately believing the opposite nowadays though). "That doesn't imply any obligation for the state to do anything on their behalf" is in fact some of the weakest commentary on a behavior you can give, other than again through the flawed modern lens that so frequently crops up where if you're not advocating calling the SWAT team in on something then you must be its biggest cheerleader or at least trying to excuse it.

Reverting to "It's not illegal" when discussing ethics is a dodge.

But we're not just discussing only ethics, unless the only compulsion you're advocating for being behind those takedown requests is that it'd be the right thing to do.

No, they think she was trying to impose conditions they didn't like.

And the Reddit admins were only trying to impose conditions on your subreddit that you didn't like.

Also, that link is four years old and references events going back much further, in the early days of online fan fiction.

And? My whole original point is that JKR was criticized for opposing fanfiction primarily in the past.

(Anyway I'm just going to ignore the rest of the stuff about whether it's reasonable to say that JKR opposes or ever opposed fanfiction or not since it's completely tangential and I'm not in an autistic enough mood today (which is not to say I never am) to dive into this conversation spiraling into dozens of tendrils of barely relevant side disputes (and I'm not saying you were the only one engaging in this up until this point by any means).)

That's more an ethical argument than a legal one.

Yes. And it's a bad one in my view. And it's similarly a bad one for Emma Watson/Hermione deepfakes too.

But Rowling could demand that the former (though not the latter) be taken down, on the basis that fan fiction is, as I said, at least currently considered an IP violation, though this hasn't really been tested in court.

And I also oppose this, though debating the validity IP law is mostly again a whole other subject.

Again, to me, the central dispute is whether openly, explicitly fictional content (again, if it's lying about being fictional, then that gets into the realm of fraud which is a whole other matter) should be prohibited because it makes its subjects uncomfortable or feel "violated" or however it's formulated (as I'm not seeing any other real justifications being advanced). I say no.