Re: Something Scary for you Geocities Site Owners...

Ben Wafer wrote:
>
> Leroy Van Camp III wrote:
>
> >     I know a fair number of the people on the two lists I Admin
> > have Geocities sites, so I thought this might be of interest.
> > Below is a section from the new terms of service for all Yahoo
> > services, which now includes Geocites.  It's very, very
> > scary.

> The bad news is that this seems to be a form letter, and from what I can infer
> from the terms of agreement they give Yahoo! rights to ANY pictures or anything
> posted on a Yahoo! page, which means that if you have a Spelljammer page on
> there using the Spelljammer logo, Yahoo! could then try to claim ownership of
> the logo, which would get TSR/WotC pissed off, and would give them an actual
> legitimate reason for clamping down on fan sites... My advice for everyone who
> has a site on Geocities is that they move it post haste, there are other free
> webpage providers out there, like Angelfire, Xoom.com, etc.
> By the way, I apologise for the off-topic post, but I feel that it's important
> for anyone with a Geocities page, and I know that a lot of people on the list
> have them.
>
	I doubt they would try.  It would be a good way to find themselves at
the bad end of a very nasty lawsuit that they would have little chance
of winning.  The simple logic is this: if they start claiming any logo
put on a fan site, then they can claim just about every logo out there.
Could you imagine them trying to claim Warhammer's logo?  Or howabout
disney's?  People use such logos all the time for making links to such
related sites.  For the most part, most companies wouldn't care about
fan pages using their logos to link to their sites, but if Yahoo! is
dumb enough to try to steal TSR's logos right out from under them by
using a clause in their contracts, they're going to find themselves in
court.  They'll also probably be seeing other companies, too, since I
doubt they would simply steal TSR's logos alone.
	BTW: Xoom, I hear, has a similar contract to Geocities, if not worst.
Don't know about Anglefire, though.  These companies may be able to
screw the little guy, but when they run up against "big brother," their
going to get their asses kicked.

--
Night Druid