GeoCities' Yahoo! boycott ends

Yahoo! has placated users of its GeoCities service with a second revision of its terms of service, which had been criticized for "stealing" customers' intellectual property rights.

The revision, which directly incorporated irate users' demands, prompted the end of a GeoCities boycott and received favorable comments from Internet rights experts.

Yahoo! maintained that it never intended its terms to grab users' content. The terms had originally applied to Yahoo!'s search-engine and portal service, but after the purchase of GeoCities -- where millions of users maintain free Web pages -- the terms were extended to cover GeoCities as well.

The change went into effect last week.

The agreement included language that seemed to grant Yahoo! a license to reproduce content posted on any GeoCities site, which worried users who post their professional work on their sites.

Yahoo! later revised the agreement, but the new language still appeared vague to many users.

Separate GeoCities accord
So now the company has created a separate agreement for GeoCities.

"Through feedback, we recognized the need for a unique Yahoo! GeoCities TOS [terms of service] that ensures the protection of our homesteaders' content, so we created a separate TOS that applies solely to Yahoo! GeoCities," Yahoo! said in a statement.

The new agreement reads, in part: "Yahoo does not claim ownership of the Content you place on your Yahoo GeoCities Site. By submitting Content to Yahoo for inclusion on your Yahoo GeoCities Site, you grant Yahoo the world-wide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, modify, adapt and publish the Content solely for the purpose of displaying, distributing and promoting your Yahoo GeoCities Site on Yahoo's Internet properties. This license exists only for as long as you continue to be a Yahoo GeoCities homesteader and shall be terminated at the time your Yahoo GeoCities Site is terminated."

Protesters pleased
GeoCities protesters welcomed the move, which addressed several specific concerns.

'They've really tightened up the language, and shown that the intention was not in any way harmful.' -- Tara Lemmey, Electronic Frontier Foundation

"As boycotters, we had asked for a number of issues to be addressed, including a definite cessation of the rights they are granted when you leave the service, the ability to leave before agreeing to any new TOS change made regarding your content and how it is used, and the clear limitation of the use of your content solely for its display on the service on which you stored this content," said Jim Townsend, who maintained the "come.to/boycottyahoo" Web site, in a statement on the site.

"The new GeoCities TOS addresses each of these concerns in a clear, positive and concise manner which may well serve as a blueprint for similar Terms of Service agreements throughout the young Internet community," he continued.

Old terms too opaque
The problem was never that Yahoo! intended to grab whatever content it could from the GeoCities Web sites, as some users believed, according to legal experts. Rather, it was that the terms of service were unclear.

"There was a lot of confusion about what Yahoo! could do with [the agreement]," said Tara Lemmey, president of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which protects online rights. "The confusion in its own right is difficult enough. Users should have clean terms of service that they understand, so they know what they're signing up for."

She said the EFF viewed the new agreement before Yahoo! finalized it.

"They've really tightened up the language, and shown that the intention was not in any way harmful," Lemmey said.

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