Category Archives: Geocities

Geocities, oocities

Oocities Revisted – Karma strikes!

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We’ve posted about the theft of original, copyrighted material before, here’s the link: Geocities Isn’t Dead  There is an organization which calls themselves ‘oocities’ that’s somehow saved vast amounts of the old Geocities site and have posted this material on their own ‘.org’ site, telling the world that they’re doing everyone a favour by archiving or preserving the old Yahoo site. Well, that would be great except they are making money from the copyrighted material. There are ads on every page and, even though they say they aren’t making enough money to cover their ‘hosting costs’, we think differently.

This week we’ve received two emails from someone named Angelique. These emails came to a private email address, not one associated with this site, and we’re not sure how they got it. Regardless, we’re going to share these emails with you. We think you’ll see the perfect karma here. By the way, this is the Facebook page that they are referring to:

Oocities.org on Facebook   (We have nothing to do with this page but we hope you will like it and support it. If you had material on Geocities, please ask oocities to remove it. File a DMCA request with Google, as we did, and get your stuff removed.)

Here’s the first email, rather cryptic to say the least:

Start

“Hello,
Herewith we kindly ask you to stop hijacking our name on Facebook
kind regards,
Angelique”

Here’s the second, adding a bit more detail:

”

Good morning Mister Mahoney,

Oh well L First of all be ensured:

We are very s o r r y you felt so strongly against “oocities” and other GeoCities archives!

In the past year some people confused your Facebook page with our support contact,
so that their conversation attempts were delayed unnecessarily.
To avoid continuous confusion it will help when you will not use the oooities Header as a Facebook title picture
and slightly change the name of your Facebook page from exactly “oocities.org” into for example “i hate oovities”

Along the way some more details maybe answering some of your complaints:
– Parts of GeoCities were archived and kept online to prevent their loss and knowing that most authors agree.
Those were filtered automatically and manually to avoid spam, copyrighted material and too personal pages.
For oocities the focus originally was a finer screening for scientific material but we only saw demand and positive feedback to keep as much as possible. oocities was carried by 28 volunteers sorting pages, answering some emails and/or donating hosting costs not matched by ad impressions.
Even when >99.9?% users are happy, complex things are hardly completely perfect.
We try to give those who aren’t happy full attention.
Some people request to delete their pages or comments, which we try to solve quickly.
Your page was deleted after 2 days without asking back. It had no visitor in the archives.
– While we don’t understand if/why your cause is to disturb “oocities” particularly(?)
we agree there are unanswered questions about the relatively young topic of web archival that we follow curiously.
And, again, we are sorry it “stressed “ you to find your old page, which surely wasn’t our intention.
When a vast cultural Inheritance, that still has a present and historical relevance is threatened (,since the abandoned GeoCities became commercially toxic to the company that ran it), but a befitting solution to save it is not going to happen – What differntly would you have thought of it if you had felt the opportunity and responsibility in 2009 to save Geocities contents (besides trying to contact everyone if possible)?

All the best,
Good luck blogging,

Angelique”

End. 

We find it ironic that these folks are upset with whoever is using their name on Facebook  while they continue to make money using copyrighted material. This is what we mean by karma.

Thanks for reading. If you had material on Geocities and you happen to find it on oocities, we suggest that you fill out a DMCA removal request to get your stuff taken down. Here’s the link:

Removing Content From Google  This form will ensure that Google, the largest search engine available, does NOT list your material on oocities in their searches.

If you have material that you want removed from oocities, here is the email address that sent us the emails above:  oocities@gmail.com   Some of our readers have found that this account either does not work or does not respond to requests so you’re on your own. Good luck!

 

Geocities

Geocities isn’t dead – protect your copyrighted material

17 Comments

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!