Yahoo in content agreement row

NEWS Internet portal, Yahoo!, has run into trouble with users of GeoCities after posting a content agreement notice on the site on Monday. The notice told members that Yahoo! had "royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive and fully sublicensable right to license and use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform and display" users' content. Its purpose, according to the company, was to allow material to be posted on mirror servers worldwide to improve access speeds. But many of GeoCities' 4.6 million users took offence to the notice and began an email campaign and Web site http://www.sitepowerup.com/boycottyahoo/boycottyahoo.htm in protest. The campaign at least partially worked and on Wednesday, Yahoo! re-posted its agreement stating: "Yahoo! does not claim ownership of the content on your site. We never have." Yahoo! bought the Web page hosting service in January for $5bn.