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Surprises

by Mike Masnick

Tue, Jun 29th 1999 11:22am





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.

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  1.  
    identicon
    Jon Acheson, Jun 29th, 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.

     

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  2.  
    icon
    Mike (profile), Jun 30th, 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

     

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  3.  
    identicon
    Dark Smurf, Jul 1st, 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

     

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]


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