LiveJournal Censorship Crackdown on Harry Potter Fanfic

This week SixApart techs deleted roughly 500 journals and communities from LiveJournal in a move that the parent company deemed important for "protecting children." Many deleted journals included fanfic devoted to the Harry Potter universe, and apparently journal and community owners were given no warning before the deletions happened. It's possible that a great deal of original work was lost. C|Net reports that fans and LJ users are in an uproar, organizing protests and contacting the company with complaints. Barak Berkowitz told C|Net:

We did a review of our policies related to how we review those sites, those journals, and came up with the fact that we actually did have a number of journals up that we didn't think met our policies and didn't think they were appropriate to have up. Our decision here was not based on pure legal issues. It was based on what community we want to build and what we think is appropriate within that community and what's not. We have an awful broad range of discussions and topics and other things going on in LiveJournal, and we encourage other broad-ranging conversations on all sorts of topics. This was a specific case where we felt there was not a reason (for these journals to stay online).

Wow. So basically a bunch of techs at SixApart who know nothing about fanfic or general fiction are going to judge whether there's "a reason" journals devoted to these topics should stay online? Are LJ members going to have to hire professors of literature and pop culture to explain why it's good for communities to share fantasy stories with each other? Henry Jenkins is awfully busy, but maybe he's going to have to become the superhero of LJ, defending fanfic against ignorant execs who don't see a "reason" for its existence.

Some speculate that the incredible slowness of LJ today is the result of attacks from disgruntled users, though no confirmation on that as of yet.

Image courtesy of Harry Potter is Evil.