nettime on Wed, 30 Jun 1999 11:07:43 +0200 (CEST) |
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yahoo indigestion: cultural tenant farming [digest: roving,neilsen] |
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - <nettime-l-temp@material.net> is the temporary home of the nettime-l list while desk.nl rebuilds its list-serving machine. please continue to send messages to <nettime-l@desk.nl> and your commands to <majordomo@desk.nl>. nettime-l-temp should be active for approximately 2 weeks (11-28 Jun 99). - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1999 20:28:07 +0100 From: nettime's_digestive_system <nettime@desk.nl> Subject: yahoo: cultural tenant farming [digest: roving, neilsen] Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1999 11:12:33 -0100 From: nettime's_roving_reporter <nettime@desk.nl> Subject: declan mccullaugh for wired news: 'yahoo: your house is my house' <http://www.wired.com/news/print_version/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." Copyright © 1994-99 Wired Digital Inc. All rights reserved. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1999 10:13:33 -0700 From: kirsten neilsen <kir-list@thinkbank.com> Reply-To: kirsten@thinkbank.com Organization: Thinkbank, Inc. / Berkeley, CA To: nettime-l@desk.nl Subject: yahoo claims rights to geocities member content [forwarded w/out express permission] Yahoo's Lawyers Take Over the Asylum How much will your free Geocities site actually cost you if they "legally" steal your content? By David "Spam Me and Die" Fiedler Sigh. They tried to slip one past us all. Before I go any further with this, I want you to know that I'm truly sad to be writing this particular column today. I'm not one of those people who run around saying "Oh, sure, I know Jerry Yang", but I have met him on a number of occasions and he's always struck me as a Nice Guy. Yesterday, Yahoo! took the first major steps in bringing millions of GeoCities users into its own network, after buying Geocities in January. Unfortunately, yesterday was also the day that Yahoo! quietly unveiled some new terms in its agreement with users of Yahoo! and Geocities properties...terms that effectively mean you're giving Yahoo! perpetual rights to any content you submit to them! Paragraph 8 is the one we're concerned about here: By submitting Content to any Yahoo property, you automatically grant, or warrant that the owner of such Content has expressly granted, Yahoo the 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 whole or part) worldwide and/or to incorporate it in other works in any form, media, or technology now known or later developed. This is one of the most horrific scenarios one could possibly imagine, but in a way I'm glad that such a high-profile company like Yahoo! was the first to try this little scam. Every time I've visited one of the sites that give you free Web space, I've read the Terms and Conditions carefully, because I was afraid that someone would try this eventually. This way, we can make enough of an outcry that perhaps we can shame Yahoo! into withdrawing the entire concept, as well as set a precedent that will effectively stop anyone else from doing the same thing. We all know that nobody would visit any site on the Web if it wasn't for the content there. In the past, sites like Geocities would be content to sell ads on their site -- which contain your content -- and the deal was that you'd get free Web space. Now apparently they want to sneak your content into their pockets as well. Well, we're not going to let them do that, are we? I am indebted to Mark Welch, who runs Web Site Banner Ads Digest among other things, for pointing this out to his subscribers, of which I am one. Mark is calling for a boycott of Yahoo! and Geocities until they mend their ways. Let's hope they see things the right way and fix this fast. Personally, I think Yahoo! is a great directory, and I use it all the time. But I'm going to give them a pass until they come to their senses. After all, if Yahoo! didn't have all our content to point to, where would they be in the first place? -- D. Fiedler David Fiedler is Editor-in-Chief of WebDeveloper.com, and his opinions are definitely his own. http://www.webdeveloper.com/refresh/refresh_062999.html