Yahoo: Your House Is My House



 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."