On the most recent episode of This Week in Tech, Leo Laporte, Jeff Jarvis, Baratunde Thurston, and John C. Dvorak wondered why Yahoo! would delete all the data from its recently discontinued Goecities service rather than keeping it backed up somewhere. They made the point that Geocities represents much of the history of the early web, and instead of deleting it, perhaps it could be given to a third party like Archive.org to keep it for posterity. The group also estimated that the total amount of data couldn’t exceed more than a couple dozen terabytes–just a few hundred dollars worth of hard drives. It was puzzling to them that Yahoo! would not take this route.
So why did Yahoo! pull the plug so dramatically? To a lawyer, unfortunately, the answer seems obvious. If Yahoo! did anything unconventional with the data it might open itself to some sort of liability, while if it destroyed the data, it would ensure no possible future liability from its use.
What sorts of liability might Yahoo! be afraid of? First there’s copyright liability. I haven’t taken a look at the original Geocities terms of service, but I wonder if it included the sort of catch-all license for which companies like Facebook have caught heat. If Geocities didn’t reserve the right to sublicense the content, then it may simply not have had the right to give away a copy of the site to an archive.
Even if it could give away a copy of Geocities, Yahoo! might become liable for choosing the wrong recipient. Archive.org may be a wonderful custodian today, for example, but who knows what it might look like in the future. Additionally, even without a copyright claim, a Geocities user could plausibly claim that while he made a deal with Yahoo!, he didn’t expect his data to be handed over to someone else–someone of whom he may not approve.
In my view, the best way Yahoo! could have handed over the data if it had wanted to would have been to sell Geocities (perhaps to Archive.org) for a token price. All liability would have traveled with the site. Yahoo!, unfortunately, had little incentive to engage in such a transaction. There would be real cost associated with such a transfer. Also, although the news stories about Yahoo! shutting down it’s one-time $3.6 billion purchase, I think they would have been much worse if there was a $10,000 sale price attached to it.
So, I doubt Yahoo! relished deleting the site, instead it was probably the least troublesome business decision to make. Luckily, lots of private third-parties took it upon themselves to salvage the site. According to Wikipedia,
In response to the closure, rival webhosting services began to compete for the web sites leaving GeoCities. For instance, German web host Jimdo started the “Lifeboat for GeoCities” service to encourage GeoCities users to put their websites on Jimdo. Geocities-closing.com, started by GeoCities competitor uCoz, is a similar project launched to save GeoCities websites.
With the GeoCities closing announcement the Internet Archive announced a project to archive GeoCities pages, stating “GeoCities has been an important outlet for personal expression on the Web for almost 15 years. Internet Archive made it their task to ensure the thoroughness and completeness of their archive of GeoCities sites. The website InternetArchaeology.org also archived and is showcasing artifacts from GeoCities. The operators of the website ReoCities downloaded as much of the content hosted on GeoCities as they could before it shut down and intend to create a mirror of GeoCities, albeit an incomplete one.
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