LJ being evil

[gchpaco]

Summary at a friend's page. As he puts it Livejournal is secretly, and deliberately, changing certain outbound links that you post.

Comments

[sidelong.livejournal.com]

That's totally devious and underhanded. I don't quite understand how LJ is making money off this, although I understand that they are.

Can you explain this better?

[gchpaco.livejournal.com]

The idea, as I understand it, is this; you post a link to a product on Amazon with your affiliate link, so you get $$ when people click through. LJ silently rewrites this to use their affiliate link instead. Ditto for a bunch of other things. Because it's so hamhanded (anything ending with ebay.com, for example, gets redirected) it's been picked up on relatively early.

[sidelong.livejournal.com]

Aha. So this also could become an intellectual property issue--if they can claim proprietary interest in the links in your posts, why not the other contents as well?

[gchpaco.livejournal.com]

Most outfits of this type used to (I dunno if they still do) claimed in their terms-of-service the right to fold, spindle, mutilate, delete, lose, find, burn or otherwise mangle any content you put into them. I doubt LJ was any exception.