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.
Hide this

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


  1. identicon
    Jon Acheson, 29 Jun 1999 @ 4:38pm

    That's appalling!

    I foresee a lawyer in the soup lines!

    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 thread ]

  2. icon
    Mike (profile), 30 Jun 1999 @ 6:41pm

    Looks like they might be backing down soon

    Article in today's News.com suggests that they may realize how big a mistake they made:

    http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,38623,00.html

    link to this | view in thread ]

  3. identicon
    Dark Smurf, 1 Jul 1999 @ 4:39am

    nasty e-mail

    I just finished sending this e-mail message to yahoo about the new merger

    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 thread ]


Follow Techdirt
Essential Reading
Techdirt Deals
Report this ad  |  Hide Techdirt ads
Techdirt Insider Discord

The latest chatter on the Techdirt Insider Discord channel...

Loading...
Recent Stories

This site, like most other sites on the web, uses cookies. For more information, see our privacy policy. Got it
Close

Email This

This feature is only available to registered users. Register or sign in to use it.