Forum: Site Announcements

As a fairly affected author, I agree. This is annoying and frustrating, but Lazeez isn't responsible for either, just dealing with reality as best as possible.

Let's be honest, age-related restrictions of any kind are, by nature, arbitrary and ludicrous. At the age of 17 years, 11 months and 29 days old, a person isn't considered "mature" enough to cope with buying alcohol, but 3 days later, they can buy as much whiskey as is in the shop and drink themselves stupid perfectly legally. What's changed? The date.

Problem is, what other option is there? A line needs to be drawn somewhere or we have anarchy. x number of years after the day you were born is as good a line as any, I suppose.

The UK. Where buying a pint in a Pub on your 18th birthday is a rite of passage.

The age to legally buy alcohol in the US is 21.

Yeah, that was a real kick in the teeth when my then girlfriend and I went to Disneyworld in between our 2nd & 3rd years of university when we were both 20.

As borrowed in my story (though slightly differently), I was never once challenged on age until after I was 21, even though I bought plenty of alcohol before that. Obviously, some people are, but it amused me then and still does.

One of the (many) problems with age-based enforcement happened repeatedly while I was in graduate school. Periodically, the police would crack down on bars and restaurant near campus and 'remind' them to check IDs for anyone who might be under 25. The result was that fewer people drank in bars and restaurants. Instead, they either went to grocery stores (notoriously lax at checking), liquor stores (not as lax, but fairly lax), or had am older friend buy alcohol.

Net effect: underage drinking went way up (much cheaper, and no need to stop and buy another round), safety went way down (no one there to cut you off), and people literally died (at least four I can think of - no one personally connected to me) who most likely wouldn't have died if they were just allowed to drink in bars.

It's somewhat different in cities where you might need to drive to and from the bar. In a campus town where there is virtually no parking anywhere near the bar and it's a short walk to thousands of people's residences, though, it was utterly counterproductive.

But, then, while I was in graduate school it was a felony to carry pepper spray on campus. Not even a misdemeanor. Personal safety be damned!

As borrowed in my story (though slightly differently), I was never once challenged on age until after I was 21, even though I bought plenty of alcohol before that. Obviously, some people are, but it amused me then and still does.

Ironically, now I'm 50, every time I buy some booze in Tesco, I secretly hope the cashier asks to see some ID.

They never do. That's fucking depressing.

I agree, and germane to this conversation, the same parental deference should be shown in regards to their children's sexual activities. Let Dad and his shotgun be the law. If he thinks Princess is ready at 14 and approves of her beau, then so be it.

Not sure I agree there at all. What if Dad doesn't think Princess is ready at 24? Or 17? Or does at 8? That's a very tricky question.

The other problem is that it's super-hard to enforce. Let's say Dad says 'Sure, no problem. 14 is old enough' to Princess. Princess subsequently gets pregnant. Dad, pissed off, says, 'I never said any such thing! Arrest that boy!' (or, per your comment, gets out the shotgun and renders the fetus fatherless).

Some basic rules:
1) has to be past puberty
2) at 18 she's an adult
So talking 13 to 17

Still doesn't deal with the 'withdrawn consent' form, and I can't imagine this turning into a contractual situation where there has to be a documented consent form signed and notarized before Princess gets to fool around. Just jumping through that hoop would keep most kids virgins until 18 :)

The interesting thing with the European model is that it's confounded by lower legal drinking ages. There seems to be a fair bit of evidence that the supervised approach you're describing works, and I support it (and that's what we did with our kids in the US), but there's also a fair bit of evidence that combining that with a legal drinking age of, say, 16 (as many European countries do) is actually worse, because kids can just go buy alcohol. Many European countries have higher rates of teen alcoholism than the US does, per the research I've seen anyway.

The 'best' model seems to be a moderately high minimum legal drinking age combined with introduction to alcohol at younger ages with a relatively low risk of serious circumvention. That means, among other things, alcohol needs to be relatively policed at home (we got into a situation where some older bottles were suddenly empty and needed to have a serious talk with the kids about why that's a bad thing).

Many European countries have higher rates of teen alcoholism than the US does, per the research I've seen anyway.

As is evidenced on many a street corner all over the UK every weekend.

Should Canada becomes an US states, Lazeez would need to expatriate fast. There is no more free speech in the US for obscenity.

Textual descriptions of teens having sex are not obscene so long as the story, taken as a whole, has literary, artistic, educational, or scientific qualities.

The under-14 stuff would probably need to be removed, as that is a grey area (it can be ruled to be obscene even with the aforementioned qualities).

That's not correct and the cases are clear on that issue.

It can be ruled obscene. See, for example,

USA v. Frank Russell McCoy

Mr. McCoy maintained a website, young-stuff.com, from his home. He authored or edited more than 200 graphic stories detailing "sexual abuse, rape, and torture of young children."

McCoy was indicted in June, 2007 and found guilty. The appeals court affirmed the conviction. Both the initial trial court and the appeals court found McCoy's stories "lack serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value".

See also United States v. Williams, where all it would take would be a single obscene story to be guilty of promoting or pandering.

Remember, the three-part test includes community standards…

- Whether the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest;

- Whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law; and

- Whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.

Under 14 is FAR risker than descriptions of adolescents or adults, because you're almost sure to fail the first to tests.

I think it's important to note that the children in the stories at issue in this case were 4 & 6. We aren't talking about teens, or even tweens (11-12).

Actually, we are for some of the grandfathered stories. Which was my point.

Stories on SOL that predate the 14+ rule that likely should be purged.

Which was also my point.

This is one of those philosophical points.

I hate the idea of 'purging' stories that do have redeeming literary merit, and some are undoubtedly included. Especially when this is the only copy of them. Losing information is a bad thing.

On the other hand, I also hate the idea of Lazeez / his hosting provider / whoever getting in legal trouble (or non-legal pressure-campaign trouble) because of hosting them.

Or do we somehow go through all of the affected stories and decide which have 'redeeming literary merit'? That seems like a daunting task.

Or do we somehow go through all of the affected stories and decide which have 'redeeming literary merit'? That seems like a daunting task.

And a subjective, inexact one to boot. In the current legal environment, if it were me, I'd think long and hard about keeping the under-14 stories. I'm a First Amendment maximalist (it f-cking says 'no law' and that means 'NO law'), but the risk of under-14 stories causing legal trouble in some jurisdiction is, in my estimation, exponentially higher than 14+ (given, e.g. Germany and Austria having 14 as the age of consent).

Textual descriptions of teens having sex are not obscene so long as the story, taken as a whole, has literary, artistic, educational, or scientific qualities.

In the UK, you can stop at the word 'obscene'. The government ruled that writing could not be pornographic.

AJ

There are a fair number of US-based sites hosting stories with underage sex. None of them have been targeted for raids, to the best of my knowledge. Yes, I read later and see that this one probably wasn't either, but the point is that I don't see much evidence for the US being that bad yet.

Could it get that bad? The way things are going, who knows? I'm very cynical about what decisions the current Supreme Court might reverse given a chance.

But there are plenty of other countries from which to host content, if one is worried.

That bothers me.

Me, too. It's a sad day.

Very sad. My hope is that someone(s) will archive enough of it that it can be moved somewhere (unknown) and made available.

There's an obvious (but unsatisfying) path: roll it up into a giant zip file / tarball / etc (or a set of them) and put the entire thing on bittorrent. As long as there's a seeder and downloaders, content lives on, and hosting is decentralized.

Definitely a priority, I think, but that means we need the content first. Perhaps Laz can create a one-stop means of getting all of the content in one go.

Over the years, I've been downloading stories from here (as epubs) and I keep them in a Calibre library. It's currently less than 4000 stories, but does include some of the more popular ones that will inevitably go because there is no way to "fix" them.

Even with less than 4000 stories, the folder is over 4Gb - so your idea has merit, but it's going to be a massive file.

Epubs are just html in a wrapper, so should compress too I'd guess. The bigger issue with it being a Calibre library is the app stores the cover separately as a jpeg. That's probably where the size is.
But even so, 13,000 files were under threat was it? Even as text, that's still a big zip file.

Right now, it's on my SSD/OneDrive. I'd need some time to prep it for sharing. And it's a Calibre library, so it's thousands of files, not one zip.

Depending on what the new "deal" that Laz is negotiating is, I'll see what I can do with the library one evening this week.

If Karen Wagner is still around, she must be pretty depressed at the loss of Naked In School stories.

AJ

I've had a quick look at my stories and I think 7 out of 37 are going to survive...

24 of those going are Swarm Cycle stories.

I'll take a look but I think half of those cannot be reworked and still make sense

Yeah, I have the same issue. The Academy can't be fixed, I figure, and there will be several others.

All of the cadet series fall into the same boat.

PS Now looks like we've had a stay of execution which is great news for all of the Swarm soties

There continues to be slow growth. There should be a new one out there now and I know of another in editing.

Thank you for the clarification on this — particularly masturbation and the amount of detail.

Is there any chance of giving one or more people a chance to get an archive of everything being removed so it can be redistributed? I understand that may be impossible (both technically and contractually) but it would be wonderful.

I can't seem to edit the tags. The options aren't there anymore to change, so I can't change anything. There must be a way -- remove something correct and then put it back, maybe -- but I can't de-select the codes because they are not there.

I can't seem to edit the tags. The options aren't there anymore to change, so I can't change anything. There must be a way -- remove something correct and then put it back, maybe -- but I can't de-select the codes because they are not there.

Just click the button to save changes. That will remove the hidden codes.

Are we not allowed to see the replies to this post? I can't see them.

I clicked on the first three replies at the bottom of the post and was taken to the replies. So I'm able to see them.

I will have to re-read some of my stuff to know if it is a problem. Just doing that will take time. How long do we have?

Ditto to that. How much time do we have? It will take me a long time to check stories out and even more time to try to revise them. I don't remember old stories I wrote and some are very old.

I have never looked at the tags and thought, Tearjerker + mt/ft = sex between teens.

They don't (didn't) always. I had "mt/ft, romantic" in "Last Kiss" and it's a no sex story. I now changed "mt/ft" to "teenagers" but there's still no sex between them. And, thanks, after your post I added "tearjerker." I had missed that one and it's a big part of the story.

Ditto. He was my editor for years. It got to the point where keeping up with his own work, life, and editing was proving difficult, so we lost touch. I'd peek in every once in a while and see him still posting, but I've been in a rut for a few years, and haven't been to the site nearly as much.

Seeing that last release in '23 breaks my heart. At least he finished Arlene and Jeff.

This isn't about legality or government actions. It's an NGO that is threatening the host with bad publicity if they don't do what the NGO wants.

The host has to consider that they will suffer reputational damage if they fight it. That's not something they want to deal with, and dropping one customer is a simple calculation.

It might have been if any of it was happening in the US.

And if it was by a government agency, which it was not.

SLAPP suits are routinely dismissed and often with sanctions against the plaintiff.

It wouldn't have to be a government agency to qualify as Tortious interference.

Those cases are tough to win when someone is simply expressing their opinion. Boycotts, encouraging disinvestment, etc, are all protected by the First Amendment.

I just wrote a fairly detailed chapter on the specific topic of tortious interference and how difficult it is to win, even against a competitor, let alone an NGO expressing an opinion.

The main issue was/is that they were never filed in court, instead, they did an end-run around the legal protections.

Boycotts, encouraging disinvestment, etc, are all protected by the First Amendment.

And I will add: and should be. Much as I loathe the opinion being expressed here, it's fully their right to boycott, encourage disinvestment, 'name and shame,' and so forth. That's part of what the First Amendment is there for. It sucks when it's aimed at you, but that's the price of (relatively) free speech.

In my opinion, there should be little sympathy for 'No one should host this filth!' arguments, but that's not reality, where we have people who want to either ban books from libraries entirely or force them into a special 'naughty book jail' part of the library, sometimes for the express reason that they can't be bothered to pay attention to which books their kids pick up and therefore every book any child could possibly put their fingers on must be appropriate for all ages. Been there, done that, in terms of fighting it.

Whatever you think of him Elon seems to have revealed that NGO means that the government gave money to a group to accomplish what the government is supposed to not be allowed to do...
Say farewell to all my work.

Say farewell to all my work.

Not just yet. Lazeez appears to have found a solution.

Please be patient. Things are looking up.

That sounds wonderful.

Well, I was going to start the arduous task of going through all the stories that have been marked for the 20+ authors that I represent, but based on this post, I'll delay that until we get a new final word from you. Keeping fingers crossed, and thank you for all that YOU do.

I'm sorry if this has been asked already but putting the stories in one big zip and having someone torrent them wouldn't be an option either?

Could be a copyright violation.

That was my fear, too. I'm not sure it is, though. The authors granted Laz the authority to reproduce and distribute their work, and I'm not sure that he wouldn't have the authority to do so via giant zip file.

You are behind the news cycle. New server found and changes on hold , back to normal for now.

It seems that more than just myself worry about BOOKAPY. Will the books posted there also get removed?

In another thread, Lazeez clarified that books on Bookapy were not affected by the original crisis.