Just Say No To Tripod or Not?

 

21 Mar 2001

Some of you may have noticed that a lot of your favorite fan fiction sites hosted on Tripod disappeared Saturday - Sunday, March 17 - 18th. Members scrambled to find their back-up copies or download cached copies from Google.com. An article at News.com stated that the mass deletion was just a glitch; a "software hiccup." MSNBC had a similar article. Just how many sites did this "software hiccup" effect? Who knows. An impromptu list had been made at Cerulia.net, listing alphabetically, several dozen homepages that had been erased without warning. It wasn't just fan fic sites either. Some people noticed that pages having to do with Halloween costuming/props and a software game called KiSS Paper Dolls were wiped. Even sites on Angelfire, another Terra Lycos company, might have been under fire. Conspiracy theories abounded between the time the pages went down and the 24 - 48 hrs Tripod promised its members that the sites would be back up.

Keeping watch on various listservs, while trying to get over the initial panic of having lost everything, I saw a few postings that went along these lines:

I called and got a message that "due to technical

problems over the weekend, some tripod

member sites were removed for terms of

service violations. Please be aware that

tripod is working to correct this problem."

 

And this one:

Supposed inside scoop from Derek Bruneau, director of

engineering and personal publishing at Tripod:

 

"What's happened is that a technical glitch caused a

bunch of sites to be removed accidentally. They're

being restored today. Believe me, it wasn't

targeted at anyone's site in particular. Lots of

different sites [were swept] --including many of our

favorites. It was just a really bad bug. Small bug, big effect.

We're working as quickly as we can to get everyone's

site back online. We know how terrible this is for

members, so we apologize profusely.

It's the last thing anyone needed right now."

 

Was it true, or was Tripod just trying to cover up something more devious? Had they become nervous from the rumors of other companies being sued for violations of copyrights and decided to cover their bases just in case? Users do now know that Tripod does have the software to systemically wipe accounts based on content without even physically looking at the site. Like most users, I was annoyed that it had happened to me even though my Stargate SG-1 site (the only one that was wiped) is labeled properly with disclaimers. Later on I received this message when my page had been restored, much to my relief:

Dear Tripod Member,

We apologize for the removal of your site over the weekend. Due to some technical errors, we

mistakenly removed several member sites and are in the process of restoring them. We did not single

out you or your site, please accept our apologies, your site has now been restored.

Sincerely,

The Tripod Team

This brought back a lot of bad nightmares from the scandal with GeoCities a few years back. Their Terms of Service agreement had once stated in not so few words, that any property on the pages was owned by GeoCities, and could be done with as they saw fit. This caused a mass exodus from the free-hosting site from angry writers, artists, and activists. Terra Lycos, the parent company that owns Tripod and other sites such as Angelfire, Wired, and Hotbot, does have a slightly better clause in which it states that the "[owner] acknowledges and agree that all information, code, data, text, software, music, sound, photographs, pictures, graphics, video, chat, messages, files, or other materials ("Content"), whether publicly posted or privately transmitted, are the sole responsibility of the person from which such Content originated." Legally that covers them from a lawsuit based on what content people put up on their servers.

Line 'l' in the prohibited conduct states the following:

Upload, post, email, otherwise transmit, or post links to any

Content that infringes any patent, trademark, service mark,

trade secret, copyright or other proprietary rights ("Rights")

of any party, or contributing to inducing or facilitating such

infringement.

A clause also exists stating that they can pull anything not in compliance, at any time, without warning:

[Owner] acknowledges and agree that the Lycos Network and its

designees shall have the right (but not the obligation), in their sole

discretion, to refuse to publish, remove, or block access to any

Content that is available via the Products and Services at any

time, for any reason, or for no reason at all, with or without notice.

So what does this mean? Are fan fic sites open for targeting again? Quite possibly. It is a free-hosting site, which means members have to abide by their rules to enjoy the benefits of not having to pay a monthly fee to keep their websites up. But there is one way to cover yourself from possible litigation when it comes to copyright violation from the company that holds the copyright; create disclaimers. State in clear and concise terms who actually holds the rights to the product. Pulling the disclaimer from an official site is a start. Adding the fact that you're non-profit can help too. You can copyright your own material, but you cannot claim the characters or anything else that was an original of someone else. Here's a version of a copyright disclaimer copied from a Due South fiction archive:

Copyright Notice

i.The characters and stories of Due South are Copyright © Alliance Communications, and are used

here without permission or license.

ii.No claims to the above copyright are made by the author of this work.

iii.This work is for non-commercial use ONLY, and is produced for the enjoyment of fans only.

iv.This work is the expression of the author and the depiction of the Due South characters herein are

in no way represented to be a part of Due South as depicted by the original author and copyright

holder(s).

Seems pretty clear and concise, but no one is sure if it would hold up in court. There have been many arguments that fan sites often help to boost interest in particular shows, and spawn fans to purchase legitimate licensed items. But the companies argue that the wide proliferation of copyrighted material goes against the rules. The recent Napster/MP3/Music Industry debate has been an excellent example of this.

Some thought the wipe was a conspiracy and left for other hosts that promised space to those who were TOSed (shorthand for being booted from a hosting site based on violation of the Terms of Service). Some know such software does exist to police based on key words and that a glitch could have happened, but still have doubts. Some believe in the glitch and have left it at that. Regardless of whether you post your fic on a free-host or on a pay site, authors still have to abide by the copyright law. Fox has closed X-Files and Buffy The Vampire Slayer fansites before, even from private servers. Check out Bringers.org for lots of information on this and what you can do, including more examples of disclaimers to use, and most interesting of all, a outline of the Fair Use policy.

Granted that there are far worse things on the internet than fan fiction, it raises important questions about free speech, content censoring, and general ideas of Big Brother Watching. Where should the line between legal and illegal be drawn? Do hosts have the right to boot users based on company mores?

I'm not eager to leave Tripod simply based on the amount of time, sweat, and hassle it would take to move to another site (I've also had a site of some form on their servers from way back before they were even associated with Lycos; circa 1995 or so). A lot of return links, pages, lists, notices, etc, would have to be changed/notified to reflect the new address. If anything, this experiment has taught me an important lesson: you can never have too many back-ups.

So, it is doubtful that any solution will be found in the short-run. In the meantime...make backups of your stuff and hope for the best, especially if you're on a free-host site.