Yahoo Angers GeoCities' Users
from the give-away-your-rights dept
Yahoo! is learning first hand that the free homepage business might not be as easy as they originally thought. Apparently, they got some bad advice from their legal counsel and decided to change the user contract. Of course, the big change is that all the material people post to GeoCities is now the property of Yahoo!. Obviously, plenty of folks have a problem with that. Yahoo! is usually pretty good about these things, so it wouldn't surprise me if they back down quickly.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
That's appalling!
Firstly, by saying that, they're opening themselves up to responsibility for that content. That's dumb, since they almost assuredly couldn't keep track of that content if they wanted to.
Secondly, I doubt this would stand up in court in a class-action lawsuit.
Thirdly, what a great boost to their web-hosting competition! It would certainly make me leave.
All in all, expect a hasty retreat once customers start bailing.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Looks like they might be backing down soon
http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,38623,00.html
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
nasty e-mail
I am sending this message to report abuse. The abuser is YOU YAHOO wtf makes you think you have the right to try and claim ownership on the contents of all our hard work???? well let me tell you right now i am moving my site to webprovider.com as they dont seek to exploit there clients like yahoo does further more I am sell about $2500 worth of yahoo sock because i dont want to deal with theifs...
you should have at least game old members one time access to there old acounts so that users could take there files and move there site if they didnt agree to the new policy! I will be talking to a lawer first thing in the morning and will be hopefully sueing your sorry asses off. I hope others will fallow
[ link to this | view in chronology ]