Yahoo: Keep Your Homestead

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.