Protection From Online Eviction? 296
AOL has been shutting down its free Web services, in some cases with little or no notice to users, and they are not the only ones. This blog post on the coming "datapocalypse" makes the case that those who host Web content should be required to provide notice and access to data for a year, and be held strictly accountable the way landlords are before they can evict a tenant. Some commenters on the post argue that you get what you pay for with free Web services, and that users should be backing up their data anyway. What do you think, should there be required notice and access before online hosts take user data offline for good?
Re:Nuts (Score:3, Informative)
i'm with you on that one. hosting and domain registration is cheap as hell these days.
OTOH, could not the same be said of free e-mail? i say this knowing that for example, Comcast's users have nothing but issues with the e-mail access included in their accounts whereas i have no issues with my free GMail access.
Contract (Score:3, Informative)
In the case of renters, we have legal protection because if you get evicted without notice you may find yourself temporarily homeless, and that is a *huge* problem. It has direct impacts on people that extend far beyond the simple financial costs of moving on short notice.
On the other hand, getting your web site shut down really only has economic impacts that are in line with the cost of moving your web site. So, if those costs are large, you should have a service level agreement with your hosting provider. The one exception is all those old links to your web site. Requiring hosting providers to provide redirects to your new site seems minimally intrusive for all concerned, and solves the problem. However, I think the size of the problem is small relative to the cost of adding yet more random crud to our legal code. If your web presence is even marginally important, buy your own domain name and then if you get evicted set it up to point to your new host.
And it goes without saying that you should have backups of your data. You should always have backups of your data.
The correct response to these things is to make a big stink about it online, so people know who to avoid (and possibly shame the companies into handling the evictions better). It is emphatically not more nanny state regulations to protect ourselves from doing things that were stupid in the first place.
Internet Archive (Score:2, Informative)
Re:No, there shouldn't be (Score:3, Informative)
If those state the owner of the free service can take the site down with no advance warning and without providing access to the data, they can do so.
I doubt AOL's lawyers would allow them to offer such a service without those conditions.
Re:No, there shouldn't be (Score:4, Informative)
What in the world are you talking about? All of the sites [circavie.com] in [aol.com] question [ficlets.com] have a nice link to AOL's TOS [aol.com] at the bottom of the page. Their TOS is fairly specific about what you can expect from the service (in this case pay attention to points 6, 17, and 18), which is absolutely squat if they say so. The services are free, what else would you expect?
I agree that there are a lot of problems with the TOS for many services, but those problems usually don't stem from being unclear (most of the time), they stem from the fact that most TOS are downright draconian, spelled out to the letter and leave the consumer with negligible wiggle room.
AOL web space was NOT free (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Nuts (Score:3, Informative)
1&1 is supposedly one of the biggest hosting companies in the world and I'm appalled at their actions. I was never able to receive any of my data, or even get any correspondence. I would say that's a pretty good definition of "eviction," and I will never do business with them again.
Re:Nuts (Score:4, Informative)
Actually under contract law many contracts require "consideration" be paid.
Case in point: NDAs. An NDA is only legally a binding contract (US-Centric law here) if the signer receives compensation in some form for it. For example, in job interviews the NDA is usually reciprocal: we don't talk about you, you don't talk about us. In others it's a lunch.
In many contracts you get or give $0.01 or $1.00 just to make sure it'll stand up.
What renters rights are in other cities/states (Score:5, Informative)
In New York City, the tenants' rights are pretty strong. It's almost impossible for a landlord to evict a tenant who pays the rent, and it takes 6 months to evict a tenant who doesn't pay the rent. My landlord has to renew my yearly lease, at an increase regulated by law. After living here several years, I'm paying about half as much as the people who are now moving in paying what we call "market rent."
That's because (1) There are more tenants in New York City than landlords (2) We had a long tradition of socialist movements in New York City that taught people how to organize into tenants' organizations and demand that our City Council pass strong laws protecting tenants. The strongest, most aggressive organization was the Metropolitan Council on Housing, whose leader, Esther Rand, openly supported the Communist Party (Lenin never liked landlords). For all their faults, those Communists knew how to organize people.
Surprisingly (for those of you who believe in the free market) it works pretty well. The landlords are still getting rich (some of them very rich). There's lots of new housing being built. And a lot of people are able to live in New York City who could never have afforded to live here otherwise. There were some houses abandoned during the economic downturn of the 80s, but that seemed to affect both rent-controlled and uncontrolled housing equally, and it happened in cities without rent control too.
In contrast, Boston had a rent control law, but a few years ago they voted it out. The last I heard, the rents have gone up, it was much harder to get an apartment in Boston, there's no building boom in affordable housing, and from a tenant's POV they're worse off than they used to be. But I'd be interested in first-hand information.
I personally don't think rent control is the ideal solution. I think people who can't afford market-rate rents should be able to live in public housing projects (which also work better than you'd think), and landlords should be allowed to get as rich they want (provided they don't do it at my expense). But rent control was part of a grand bargain that the landlords in New York City struck with the tenants' organizations.
I think the lesson is that tenants can get a much better housing market, with more affordable rents, if they organize and pass laws that benefit them, than they would if they leave it to the free market. If you want to learn how to organize, do a Google search for an MP3 of Pete Seeger's song, "Talking Union." Or search for "Howard Zinn".
Re:6 weeks isn't "little or no notice" (Score:4, Informative)
If they had the world's most extensive blog, with hundreds of thousands of words scattered through thousands of posts, and six weeks isn't enough time to evacuate ...
Such a person needs to archive their entire website.
There is one such utility that comes to mind. It is called HTTrack [httrack.com] and is freely available for a variety of platforms.
From the site:
HTTrack is a free (GPL, libre/free software) and easy-to-use offline browser utility.
It allows you to download a World Wide Web site from the Internet to a local directory, building recursively all directories, getting HTML, images, and other files from the server to your computer. HTTrack arranges the original site's relative link-structure. Simply open a page of the "mirrored" website in your browser, and you can browse the site from link to link, as if you were viewing it online. HTTrack can also update an existing mirrored site, and resume interrupted downloads. HTTrack is fully configurable, and has an integrated help system.
Been using it for years and it works VERY well.
Dropping XDrive as well (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Contract (Score:3, Informative)
So there are libertarians here (Score:3, Informative)
Anyone wonder why property investors avoid certain parts of the East Cost US like the plague? It's because they have those laws there that can keep a squatter in a place for 9 months WHILE THEY DON'T PAY A DIME TO THE LANDLORD. Meanwhile, the landlord is paying a mortgage, property taxes, insurance, maintenance, etc.
The People's Republic of Santa Monica is the same way. The renters' rights group [smrr.org] there is the single-most powerful political organization in the city. So powerful, that even unrelated political groups (unions, you name it) have to align with the SMRR in Faustian bargains to get anything passed (you're either with us, or against us, as Bush says). Think about owning a building in that city! There are rent control laws, so why invest in your property? So the apartments are all dilapidated and ugly But go 5 miles east to Westwood, and the buildings are new and beautiful and have underground parking and nice workout rooms. And no rent control.
Funny how people here are afraid of the government actually doing what it is supposed to do, the whole reason we formed the social compact: Protect me and my shit from other people and other countries. Can't eavesdrop on terrorists outside the country or get DNA from a mosquito or demand a convicted rapist's e-mail account. But tell me what I can do with my own goddamn property? Sure! Redistribute wealth? Awesome!
It's not libertarian if you only want the government to stay out of your life. As I used to have in my sig: Slashdot, libertarian for me, statist for the other guy.
Re:Yes, there should be (Score:4, Informative)
Read the TOS please. It states that AOL can take it down at anytime and the users agreed to that.
How about people taking some reponsibilty for a change?
Make stinking backups.
Heck USB flash drives and DVDs are CHEAP. make copies people.
Please don't play lawyer (Score:5, Informative)
There are actually two elements of unconscionability: Procedural and substantive. Procedural means that the process was unfair in some way; in this case, that the end user had no reasonable alternative but to sign a contract of adhesion. O rly? There aren't 100's of free Web hosts out there besides AOL? Not to mention the cheap-ass Web hosts out there. I have a great one with a free domain name for $7/month with phenomenal service that has backups in a different state! So I doubt there is procedural unconscionability.
As for substantive, were there grossly unfair - not just unfair, but so unfair as to "shock the conscience of the court" - or surprise terms in the contract? Or were AOL's TOS in line with what most free Web hosts offer? Substantive unconscionability is a very high burden to meet, and the vast majority of contracts of adhesion are upheld for this reason. Almost certainly this substantive element would fail as well.
It's this principle that is the source of the renter's protection laws that you despise so much.
No, the principle is that there are more renters than apartment owners, and therefore politicians pander to the tyranny of the majority (and those who feel sorry for them) while trampling on the property rights of the minority. Votes over principle. Just please don't call it "renters' rights." There are no such rights, only cynical politicians willing to rob from Peter to pay Paul; and the politician who does that will always have the support of Paul.
And lastly, if the cut-off of service wasn't mentioned at all in the TOS, the customers may have a remedy in tort for damages. The TOS would have to explicitly waive liability on cessation of service to exclude recovery in tort.
Dude, first off, stop trying to sound like a lawyer - it's like when a white guy tries to speak urban lingo - he just sounds lame. "A remedy in tort" - LOL.
Secondly, obviously the biggest ISP in the world has an indemnity clause in its TOS. More importantly, AOL is based in Virginia - a UCITA [wikipedia.org] state - and its choice of forum and law clauses dictate all disputes are to be litigated there under VA law. So even without an indemnity clause, it's unlikely end users would win a lot of court cases in VA.
IAALBNYLATINLA (I Am A Lawyer But Not Your Lawyer And This Is Not Legal Advice). And I have taught business law for ten years, so I am not totally talking out of my arse.
Re:Yes, there should be (Score:3, Informative)
Absolutely true that there are plenty of restrictions on what a company, or a person, can do to a victim. But I have a question for you: Who is the victim? The TOS, which is a contract agreed to by both parties, lays out that there is no guarantee of reliability, no promise that the service will continue to exist. Therefore, AOL has every right to terminate the contract. If the TOS says notice is required, then AOL must give notice. If not, then it is not required. Sure, it would be polite, but it isn't legally required. Since there was no breach of contract, there was no victim.
Right again. But who poisoned anyone? Who acted in a harmful manner? AOL provided the service as promised, as contracted by the TOS. So, again, there is no victim. There is only an upset user who didn't like the contract he signed after it was properly executed, then properly terminated.
These are the same people who assume that laws offer protections in situations they were never meant to apply for. These are the same people who sue gun companies for murder. These are the same people who offer up and/or fall prey to straw man arguments.
Like your arguments.
Re:FF extension to save submitted forms? (Score:3, Informative)
Start typing. See suggestion list appear. Press down arrow to select typo. Press delete. You'll never see the typo again.
Now, why that isn't explained anywhere in any documentation I can find, I don't know. But it's there, and it works, and it's handy.
You might also like to try out It's All Text! which lets you edit text boxes with your favorite editor. Local copes are then just a :w ~/foo/bar.txt away. Not automatic, but I use it when writing something long.
Re:Nuts (Score:4, Informative)
In Wisconsin you are not allowed to evict a tenant between November and March (IIRC). The idea is that people can freeze to death without a home.
This is a common belief, but it isn't actually true. See here:
http://www.portagelawyers.com/pamphlets/landlord_tenant.asp#A8 [portagelawyers.com]
http://www.legis.state.wi.us/statutes/stat0704.pdf [state.wi.us]