AUSTIN, Texas -- This week, a huge Internet battle was resolved, and if you publish or plan to self-publish on the Web, its implications will affect you.
The fight started in June when Yahoo! changed the terms of its service policy on Geocities.com, the Web hosting site it now owns. The new service policy transferred Yahoo!'s own policies onto Geocities. The policy, which created an instant uproar in the Geocities community, read, in part, "By submitting Content to any Yahoo! property, you automatically grant Yahoo! the royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive and full sublicensable right and license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate" Web pages submitted.Translated into English, the policy says that Yahoo! would own anything people publish on their own sites -- including original content, graphics, text and video posted on personal Web pages -- and could use it for whatever Yahoo! wanted to, royalty-free.
Web authors, a group notoriously vocal in their efforts to protect their right to post family vacation photos on the Web without having to cower to The Man, started a boycott of Yahoo!. Their main point of contention was that the policy was retroactive.
The Geocities watchdogs went into action, creating a Boycott Yahoo! Web site and altering their Geocities pages to make them gray, which they called the "Haunting of Geocities."
They advised Net activists to use other search engines and to repost their sites using other free Web hosts that compete against Geocities. Suddenly, Yahoo! was in the hot seat.
To its credit, the Internet company recognized the error of its ways and changed its policy. In an open letter addressed to "Homesteaders," the company said it made a mistake, trying to merge the terms of services for two companies into one.
The Boycott Yahoo! site announced "It's Over!" and the Haunting of Geocities became the Rehabitation of Geocities.
Despite the resolution, the Yahoo! flap is an important lesson in the increasingly complex issue of copyright law on the Internet. There are a few absolutes: If you use your company's computer for e-mail and you check it on company time, chances are you don't own it and you have no privacy. If you create Web content for a company as a full-time worker, you don't own what you write. And you generally give up your rights of ownership on e-mail you receive using a free Web-based mail service.
Typically, the creative author of a work is the legal copyright owner, but what about republishing rights and the right to use user pages to promote a site such as Yahoo!? Could Yahoo! reprint Geocities Web sites on a CD-ROM, for instance, as an archive?
Joe Dreitler, an intellectual property lawyer specializing in trademarks and the Internet, says questions like this will continue to arise as more people publish on the Web, and many more cases will erupt as companies try to establish boundaries on what belongs to them and what belongs to users.
"It's one example of the stickiness on issues of ownership on the Internet," said Dreitler, who works for Vorys, Sater, Seymour and Pease in Columbus, Ohio. "In the Yahoo! case, they argued that they have a role in the creation of the work because they make the technical adjustments that go into it. But if all they're doing is posting it up on the Web, that's a fairly aggressive position. The owner under copyright law is the person who creates the work -- that in my opinion is the person who sits down at the computer and creates a Web site."
The best defense against such problems, Dreitler said, is to read the fine print.
Many users don't read the agreements and don't know what rights they're giving up. For instance, buying a copy of Microsoft Word doesn't entitle you to ownership of the software -- only a license to use it. It's all in the license agreement.
"But people don't read that, they never do," Dreitler said.
In the Yahoo! case, the boycott was justified -- the rules were changed long after the game was being played. But as an increasing amount of our time and work goes online, it's important to know what we own and what we don't.