________________________________________________________________________________ ====================[http://www.wired.com/news/news/politics/story/20472.html]== Yahoo: Your House Is My House by Declan McCullagh 3:00 a.m. 29.Jun.99.PDT If you're a GeoCities homesteader, be warned: Your Web site is no longer your own. Yahoo, which launched its Yahoo-GeoCities site Monday, says it owns all Web pages, articles, and images on member sites and has "irrevocable" rights to them for all time. This presents a problem for those GeoCities members who have painstakingly assembled large sites with dozens, even hundreds, of pages of valuable material. "Somebody please tell me that this does not mean that Yahoo is demanding the rights to a large portion of my professional writing and photography if I use my Web site there," complained Tracy Marks, who estimates that she has 600 Web pages and 23 MB of files on GeoCities. To create or update GeoCities pages, members must agree to a contract that gives Yahoo broad rights over their intellectual property. Under its terms of service, publishers must give Yahoo a "royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive and fully sublicensable right and license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform and display such Content" in any form or media. Yahoo defends the terms in the contract, saying it's trying to prevent itself from being sued over copyright infringements and wants the ability to promote its service. Consumer advocates say Yahoo has gone too far. "It's a bad idea. People don't read the fine print on these contracts. People will give up intellectual property to Yahoo without understanding what they're getting into," said Jamie Love of the Ralph Nader-affiliated Consumer Project on Technology. "People have made investments by promoting their site and people start to link to them. They're changing the rules in midstream," Love said. Legal experts say that it's likely Yahoo will change its mind. "I bet that once it comes to light, they'll modify it. They can't get away with it. They'd have people leaving in droves," said David Post, a law professor at George Mason University who teaches intellectual property law. "My prediction is that Yahoo will say, 'That's not what we intended. We don't really want to do all these things with their content. We had it as an insurance policy,'" Post said. Some scholarly journals have standardized similar contracts that are even more restrictive: They require authors to give up all rights to the publication. But as authors began to want to post their writings on their Web sites, journals have started to become more flexible. Yahoo will let users keep their existing GeoCities pages under the old contract, but customers cannot modify their site until they agree to the revised terms of service. Some other Web page-hosting services have similar contracts. Tripod, which is owned by the parent company of Wired News, requires its users to grant it "a royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, nonexclusive, worldwide, unrestricted license to use, copy, modify, transmit, distribute, and publicly perform or display the submitted Member Web Page." ================================================================================ ====================[http://www.wired.com/news/news/politics/story/20518.html]== Yahoo: Your Homestead's Your Own by Declan McCullagh 4:30 p.m. 30.Jun.99.PDT In response to a boycott and criticism from outraged customers, Yahoo late Wednesday abandoned rules that had given it eternal ownership of all GeoCities Web sites. "We're seeing how we can clarify our intentions, given the recent outcry," said Tim Brady, Yahoo vice president of production. The new terms of service, which took effect 3 p.m. PST Wednesday after executives spent the morning huddling with lawyers, now stress that "Yahoo does not own content you submit." The company said that Yahoo will use customers' intellectual property only when displaying it on Web sites and for promotion and marketing. Many GeoCities homesteaders worried that Yahoo could take their Web pages and republish them -- even in another form, which the contract allowed, such as books or CD-ROMs. Customers still had the right to publish or distribute their intellectual property themselves. Experts say the changes are poorly drafted, but conclude that Yahoo has seriously constrained its ability to republish members' content. "The addition is a significant limitation on what they can do. They can still reproduce, publish, translate, but can only do that for certain purposes," said David Post, professor of law at Temple University. "If they took my Web site and printed it out and published it as a book, they can't do that on the basis of this license," said Post, who teaches intellectual property law. That's exactly what Yahoo has said all along. "Clearly our intention is not to publish books," Brady said. "Hopefully, with the language we're looking at, it will be very clear to our users that that is not the case." Brady said Yahoo's rules were in place before it bought GeoCities, though he conceded they were not written with Web hosting services in mind. "If we took a snapshot of our business today, we could make paragraph eight [in the terms of service] more narrow," he said. "But we all know how quickly the Web moves and everything's in flux. We need the flexibility to adapt our services." When GeoCities homesteaders recently learned that Yahoo said it owns all Web pages, articles, and images on member sites and has "irrevocable" rights to them for all time, the response was quick and furious. "I did not spend the time to create unique content for my friends, family, or anyone else who might be interested in my home page only to have the fruit of my efforts appropriated by Yahoo/GeoCities," GeoCities member Wes Kim wrote in an email to Wired News. "What incentive is there for home page creators to generate rich content?" Some disappointed homsteaders launched a boycott. "Stop using Yahoo. Boycott them, and all of their properties. This includes Yahoo.com, Geocities.com, and Broadcast.com. Don't buy products from merchants at shopping.yahoo.com and let them know why!" the organizers said. Under the old terms of service, site owners had to give Yahoo a "royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive and fully sublicensable right and license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform and display such content" in any form or media. ================================================================================ ________________________________________________________________________________ no copyright 1999 rolux.org - no commercial use without permission. is a moderated mailing list for the advancement of minor criticism. more information: mail to: majordomo@rolux.org, subject line: , message body: info. further questions: mail to: rolux-owner@rolux.org. archive: http://www.rolux.org