Remember Yahoo Geocities? The online community of websites that turned the Internet into a nice, homey place to visit? Geocities hosted my first few websites back in the ’90s. In 2009, Yahoo decided to put an end to Geocities. Hundreds of thousands of websites were suddenly offline, mine included. Of course we were warned far in advance that Geocities was closing down. Most of the members simply saved their pages, leaving the originals online until they were gone with the rest of Geocities. That’s what we thought happened. It turns out the Geocities isn’t really dead, it’s just different and in the hands of someone else. How did this happen? Let me tell you.
At least three sites backed up some or all of the Geocities site before it went offline. This is relatively easy to do and I’m surprised that Yahoo didn’t prevent this from happening. In retrospect, it makes perfect sense to steal all the sites and then market them as your own. It makes perfect sense to a thief, that is. Here are the sites that I know have backed up some or all of the old Geocities website:
1. http://www.archive.org/ has backed up almost the whole Internet, at some point or other. If you had a website at some point in the past, IA has probably archived one or more iterations of it.
2. http://reocities.com/ has also sucked up some or all of the Geocities pages and offers them up from their site. As far as I can tell, reocities doesn’t have advertising on the site. If you find an ad, let me know and I will change this. I don’t have a problem with these guys or with IA. They aren’t making money from the copyrighted material that had been on the old Geocities site.
3. http://www.oocities.org/ is a different story completely. The first clue would be the .org domain name. You’d think this site would be full of generous people helping other folks out, wouldn’t you? You’d be wrong. What you really have is a site that has stolen all of the old Geocities sites and monetized them. Flashy ads show up on every page except the main page of the site. Why is this? I suspect that it’s to give you the impression that these people are doing us all a favor by keeping the Geocities sites alive.
You know what’s worse than putting the ads on other people’s copyrighted material? The fact that it would be very, very easy for the owner(s) to scan the site and collect all of the email addresses. In the blink of an eye these guys could notify the actual owners of the original sites that oocities.org is using their material. Did they do this? Nope. They hide behind the general goodwill of the Internet, allowing the site to be crawled by search engines but not trying to contact any of the original owners.
On the Geocities site, each site owner was able to do two things. First, they could access their own pages and edit them as they see fit. Second, they could pay a fee each month which would remove the ads from their pages. That way they would either put up their own ads or simply maintain an ad-free site. Geocities had terms of service for everything and, overall, it was a very well-run company. Unfortunately, I can’t say the same thing about oocities.org. They pretend to be doing the world a favor but, in fact, they are making money off of someone’s copyrighted work.
If you had a Geocities page in the past, check to see if it’s being used by oocities.org. Contrary to their FAQ, your page isn’t ‘removed within hours’ after you contact them to take your stuff down. It takes at least two days. Reocities will also remove your pages. They have set up an online form for that. I would hope that, like me, you’d be a bit ticked off that your very own material is being used by someone else. Theft of this kind is disturbing, to say the least.
Thanks for reading!
I have content on an old GeoCities site that Oocities is stalling on removing after promising to do so “within 14 days” (and that was after further stalling). It’s now about 3 weeks after that promised removal yet it’s still live on Oocities and now they won’t return my emails. I contacted Google and they say I have to get Oocities to do it. Thanks Oocities for keeping your promise – NOT.
There’s not too much you can do, unfortunately. Do a search for ‘other site using my material’ and check out some of the links. Here is one that we found just now: https://lorelle.wordpress.com/2006/04/10/what-do-you-do-when-someone-steals-your-content/ We know how frustrating this is but you have to remember that the people or person who runs Oocities are dishonest from the word go as well as being not very bright. Good luck and thanks for commenting.
I am having problems with reocities. I am asking them to remove all the old content because I want to update it but they’re not responding. To think I remember removing some content from Geocities before the closing! What gives?
We had a problem, same as you. The thing to do it to contact Google and have them stop listing your page(s) on their search engine. It takes a bit of time but it is your intellectual property, not reocities. You probably did remove the content but we think they were already saving the pages using software such as ‘site sucker’ to download the whole website. You can’t update anything there since it’s all behind their servers. Hopefully they will just fade off but try the Google suggestion first. Many people are up in arms about their material being stolen or used for reocities personal gain. We don’t know what will happen next but we feel someone should take charge of this, Google for one. Thanks for commenting.
Reocities removed my content. The problem here is OOcities.org. After requesting them to remove my site, they replied saying it will be done in 15 days. I don’t know why they can’t do it right away, honestly. My site is still up.
They’re not responding to my emails and the site is full of INSURANCE COMPANY ads. Shame on oocities.org and Pasch Friedrich, who’s supposedly the main tech guy in there.
Oocities is very difficult to get along with, we agree. If you can’t get them to remove your material there are a couple of things you can try. First, report their use of copyright material to Google Adsense. We are assuming they use Adsense since it’s the biggest ad revenue agency out there. Here’s a link you can try: https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/9892?hl=en (copy and paste it into your browser). The second thing you can try is to get Google to remove your content from its search engine. That has the same effect as removing your material from the site since no one will be able to search for it, at least on Google. Here is the link for that: https://support.google.com/legal/troubleshooter/1114905?hl=en
We see Oocities as a flagrant violation of all copyright laws in existence. How they continue to run the site is difficult for us to believe. On top of the copyright violations, they make it seem like they’re doing the world a service. Even the use of the .org domain is misleading.
Good luck and thanks for commenting.
Any idea how to get an oocities site taken down? I created a webpage in college which was long gone until they republished it online in 2009. I’ve written to the email address on their site multiple times with no response. I tried emailing their webhost also (ovh) who never responded. I don’t know where to turn.
The host of this site has no interest in removing your copyrighted work. We’ve had the same problem with a few of our old Geocities sites. If this email: oocities@gmail.com won’t respond, you can do a couple of other things, but they take time. Since oocities has ads on its site, you can report the copyright infringement to google and have them remove oocities from their search engine, at least as far as your old site is concerned. Here’s the link for that: http://support.google.com/bin/static.py?hl=en&ts=1114905&page=ts.cs Since your rights are defended by your local federal justice system, depending on where you live, you can report the site to them. In the U.S., the FBI takes care of that. Here is a link with information on intellectual Property Theft: http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/investigate/white_collar/ipr/ipr In Canada, we have the RCMP but they have not responded to our query about this site. It just occurred to us that the hosting company for the oocities site may not know they are hosting illegal content. That might be another avenue for users such as yourself.
Good luck! Let us know the result, if any.
Thanks for commenting.
Good work. The email addresses in the WHOIS database don’t work. I tried emailing and I got a bounce back.
I’ve lodged a complaint with Google and they are yet to respond. Google is just one search engine though, I’ll need to do this for the other big ones.
Oocities really needs to be removed, I can’t believe it is still running and being renewed.
Google took the material down that we told them about. It took a few weeks but it’s gone now. All of this stuff is copyright material so there should be a way to get the site officially closed somehow. Good luck and thanks for commenting.
Thanks mate. I noticed that Bing and Yahoo also bring up the page, which I need to look into!
Google is the main search engine, that’s all we worried about. We are looking for a way to get the site’s Adsense account terminated. Not only is the site using copyrighted material, they are making money from it. If you search for DMCA in Google, you’ll generate lots of links to help you out. There are many helpful sites that explain the process. We’ll do the same when we have more time.
You’ll be interested to hear that we just got an email from oocities. The email they sent it from, supposedly, is: oocities@gmail.com and their IP is: 209.85.220.173. The sender is: oocities archive support and the subject line is: Re: “Please remove my pages from your site. Second notice” The rather cryptic message is: “Hello,
Herewith we kindly ask you to stop hijacking our name on Facebook
kind regards,
Angelique”
The email address that this was sent to is one that we use for our site admins. Your guess is as good as ours as to what the heck this is all about. Lastly, do a search for oocities on Facebook. Copy and paste this link to the page:
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Oocitiesorg/241642785950585?ref=ts&fref=ts . You’ll get a laugh out of it, I’m sure. It could be that they are guessing that this Facebook site is somehow related to Computers Made Simple. Odd how they get upset at ‘hijacking a name’ when they have hijacked thousands of copyrighted pages!
We’ve found another email that might help: m4sjmrplfzw8cweoa5wb@o.o-w-o.info This is from a whois search. The full search result is (F. Pasch is the name of the registrant) :
Domain ID:D160146219-LROR
Domain Name:OOCITIES.ORG
Created On:14-Sep-2010 19:19:11 UTC
Last Updated On:17-Jul-2011 04:15:07 UTC
Expiration Date:14-Sep-2013 19:19:11 UTC
Sponsoring Registrar:OVH (R135-LROR)
Status:CLIENT DELETE PROHIBITED
Status:CLIENT TRANSFER PROHIBITED
Registrant ID:ovh4e2261c920yn
Registrant Name:Pasch F.
Registrant Street1:oocities.org, office #2767864
Registrant Street2:c/o OwO, BP80157
Registrant Street3:
Registrant City:Roubaix Cedex 1
Registrant State/Province:
Registrant Postal Code:59053
Registrant Country:FR
Registrant Phone:+33.899701761
Registrant Phone Ext.:
Registrant FAX:
Registrant FAX Ext.:
Registrant Email:m4sjmrplfzw8cweoa5wb@o.o-w-o.info
Admin ID:ovh4e2261c92083
Admin Name:Pasch Friedrich
Admin Street1:oocities.org, office #2767864
Admin Street2:c/o OwO, BP80157
Admin Street3:
Admin City:Roubaix Cedex 1
Admin State/Province:
Admin Postal Code:59053
Admin Country:FR
Admin Phone:+33.899701761
Admin Phone Ext.:
Admin FAX:
Admin FAX Ext.:
Admin Email:b8osn5y25bae17o9d1ih@t.o-w-o.info
Tech ID:ovh4e2261c92083
Tech Name:Pasch Friedrich
Tech Street1:oocities.org, office #2767864
Tech Street2:c/o OwO, BP80157
Tech Street3:
Tech City:Roubaix Cedex 1
Tech State/Province:
Tech Postal Code:59053
Tech Country:FR
Tech Phone:+33.899701761
Tech Phone Ext.:
Tech FAX:
Tech FAX Ext.:
Tech Email:b8osn5y25bae17o9d1ih@t.o-w-o.info
Name Server:DNS17.OVH.NET
Name Server:NS17.OVH.NET
Name Server:
Name Server:
Name Server:
Name Server:
Name Server:
Name Server:
Name Server:
Name Server:
Name Server:
Name Server:
Name Server:
DNSSEC:Unsigned
I want to obtain permission to use (commercially) a photo of a hat on the Internet that is apparently the property of reocities.com, but I cannot find any contact information for them. Do you have a contact email or phone number?
If the photo is part of the old geocities site, then the rights to the photo are NOT owned by reocities. Reocities basically stole everyone’s material and created their own site out of it. The only email I have is j@ww.com, which is the email you would use to help out on restoring (stealing) the old Geocities material. There is a form page you could try but if the photo of the hat is on one of the old Geocities sites, then reocities doesn’t own the rights. Don’t try to contact them as they will most likely charge you a fee for something they don’t own. Check around the pages where you found the photo and see if there is an email link there, or a name, whatever. Good luck!