(no subject)

When LJ is down, there's nothing better than having posts back to skip=450 open from everything you missed over the prior two days.

It's 913 now; wonder when this'll post.

What have y'all been up to?

Have you seen the new issue of Esquire?

The New York Times has an article today about Esquire's piece on Heath Ledger's last days; there's two quirky things about it that the Times highlighted:
1. It's a work of fiction; and
2. It's written in first-person diary form.

In other words, it's Real Person Fic, but unlike other recent fictionalizations of real people (like the "I'm F*cking..." vids on Jimmy Kimmel), obviously, this time the person being fictionalized could not participate or consent.

It can't be libel or slander because you can only defame a living person, and it isn't clear that anything in the article could be deemed defamatory anyway. There are possible "trademark" issues, except they may be mitigated by the fact that Esquire didn't plug the article on the magazine's cover; it's just there, inside, on one of the pages.

Also, the Times says the article is labeled as fiction; has anyone seen their actual "disclaimer" language?

I'm interested in what people think of this piece - for me, even though I generally don't have a problem reading RPF as long as it's labeled so that people who stumble across it don't think it's truth, the story feels a little ghoulish and I would probably have no problem with it if they published it next winter, but it's barely been eight weeks and it's still too fresh to have any purposeful context.

I'm interested in a way, though, whether the family tries to take any action against Esquire over this - because I know some fandomers regularly fret about the subjects of RPF or TPTB taking action against Real Person Fic, but couldn't this become that sort of precedent-setting case *if* the family got extremely upset about it?

Some things are completely out of any of our control.