Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Yahoo! The Internet

Yahoo Deletes Journalist's Pre-Paid Legacy Site After Suicide 403

New submitter digitalFlack writes "Apparently Martin Manley has been a popular blogger and newspaper journalist for many years. For his own reasons, no indication of illness, he decided sixty years on this planet was enough. He designed a 40-page website with sections such as: 'Why Suicide?' and 'Why Age 60?.' Martin planned his suicide meticulously, but to manage his legacy, he picked Yahoo. He even pre-paid for five years. After he left this mortal coil on his 60th birthday, Yahoo decided they don't want his traffic, so they took the site down. Sorry, Martin."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Yahoo Deletes Journalist's Pre-Paid Legacy Site After Suicide

Comments Filter:
  • Fuck Yahoo! (Score:5, Informative)

    by ShaunC ( 203807 ) on Saturday August 17, 2013 @02:51PM (#44595233)

    In the meantime, there is a mirror located here [zeroshare.info].

  • Re:Mirror? (Score:5, Informative)

    by dmbasso ( 1052166 ) on Saturday August 17, 2013 @03:11PM (#44595365)
  • Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Saturday August 17, 2013 @03:22PM (#44595465)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • by Joiseybill ( 788712 ) on Saturday August 17, 2013 @03:27PM (#44595509)
    I was gonna rant about refunding the estate for the residual value of his contract, and for the 5 year domain registration.. or at least transfer it to his estate.. BUT.. Yahoo's TOS specifically deals with death.
    "No Right of Survivorship and Non-Transferability. You agree that your Yahoo! account is non-transferable and any rights to your Yahoo! ID or contents within your account terminate upon your death. Upon receipt of a copy of a death certificate, your account may be terminated and all contents therein permanently deleted."

    Allegedly, this was in effect for a while.. the page
    http://info.yahoo.com/legal/us/yahoo/utos/utos-173.html [yahoo.com]
    says it was last updated March 16, 2012.
    For a man who made a living with his words, maybe he should have read the TOS ( short by some comparison). Or, maybe like the false 'treasure hunt', he knew Yahoo would cancel his account, and through both methods he gains some post-mortem notoriety. Either way.. I hope he gets some pleasure out of all this attention to his life being generated today.
  • by julesh ( 229690 ) on Saturday August 17, 2013 @03:35PM (#44595561)

    Yahoo has contractual obligation to provide service, sudden death of a party is a sleazy way to weasel out of a service contract.

    Unless he violates the terms of service.

    10.1 Prohibited Uses
    [...]
    You agree that you will not:
    [...]
    (p) promote or provide instructional information about illegal activities, promote physical harm or injury against any group or individual, or promote any act of cruelty to animals.

    A section of his site was instructions on how to commit suicide, which is an illegal act in many (most?) jurisdictions.

  • Re:Mirror? (Score:3, Informative)

    by Em Adespoton ( 792954 ) <slashdotonly.1.adespoton@spamgourmet.com> on Saturday August 17, 2013 @03:57PM (#44595703) Homepage Journal

    http://www.zeroshare.info/ [zeroshare.info]

    http://web.archive.org/web/20130815235729/http://martinmanleylifeanddeath.com [archive.org] as well, which is guaranteed to reflect the original.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 17, 2013 @05:39PM (#44596441)

    Some facts that people who fault Yahoo for taking the site down overlook:

    • The journalist disclaimed all rights to the site's content and released it into the public domain. Thus there is no content to inherit. His estate has exactly as much claim to the content as anybody else: None. Yahoo can not violate anybody's right to the content, as there is no such right.
    • The Yahoo terms of service clearly state that their hosting contracts are non-transferable and end upon death. With the contract ends Yahoo's obligation to keep publishing the content. His estate does not have grounds to sue for contract violation, as Yahoo is not in breach of the contract. The contract ended. His estate can enter into a new contract, but...
    • Condoning self-harm is against Yahoo's terms of service. The site contains information about suicide methods and makes an argument for killing oneself before old age sets in. Thus the site is clearly in violation of Yahoo's terms of service, and Yahoo would be within their contractual rights if they had chosen to remove the site even before he killed himself.

    Also, "-1, Troll" is not an acceptable expression of disagreement.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 17, 2013 @08:22PM (#44597309)

    Linked from the first paragraph of the index page is the following text (copied from a mirror of the site): "I, Martin Manley, being the creator and owner of all information on the site "MartinManleyLifeAndDeath.com", neither hold nor retain any claim or copyright on any part of this web-site. I do not grant these rights to any individual person or entity either in life or upon death. Rather I release all rights to this work -ï making it public domain. Anyone can do with it whatever they wish. Martin Allen Manley August 15, 2013"

    From the general Yahoo terms of service: "You agree that your Yahoo! account is non-transferable and any rights to your Yahoo! ID or contents within your account terminate upon your death."

    From the Yahoo web hosting terms of service [yahoo.com]: "You agree that you will not: [...] promote physical harm or injury against any group or individual".

  • Re:good for him! (Score:5, Informative)

    by Sir Holo ( 531007 ) on Saturday August 17, 2013 @10:11PM (#44597789)

    This little quote from the guy's site:

    The thought of being in a nursing home, physically or mentally disabled, was the single scariest thing I had ever thought about

    This is exactly what I've been thinking for years now...

    I worked as a nurses' aide in a nursing home one college during summer. (Nurses' Aide = butt-wiper.) It was a depressing, terrifying job. Most "residents" had bed-pads because they couldn't get up to go poo. We had:

    * A woman who had long lost her mind, was cemented in a fetal position, and regularly coded. Staff had to restart her heart each time, because she had no living relatives or living will.
    * A woman who had long lost control of her body, but not her mind, and was just never visited by any of her children.
    * The many who would be tied down to their bed, to prevent them from getting up and wandering around.
    * The profoundly retarded girl (36 yo) that staff would purposely put into (rigid) seizure, in order to make it easier to change her bedding.
    * The Alzheimer's woman who thought I was her son. When she'd be combative to other staff, they'd have me ask her, "please mom, just eat this pudding," which had sleep meds mixed in.
    * Bedsores.
    * And Golda, senile and assumed incapable of coherent speech. Staff were just to lazy to listen between the word salad and half-words. She eventually spoke a full sentence to me ("I need to go to the bathroom"), the only one in five years, I was told. I took her in, stepped away, and she had her first taste of freedom in years.

    Needless to say, I will not allow myself to fall into such a situation in infirmity. Adult children of old people –– Your parent knows that living alone at home, doing what s/he wishes to do, may suffer a fatal fall or similar in their home. They are probably at peace with this. Don't let your own fear of personal, potential guilt lead you to essentially put your aging parent in a white-walled jail for their remaining years. Would you want to spend your last 10 years of life in a bed, with only a TV to keep you company?

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday August 18, 2013 @03:34AM (#44598777)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • by gordo3000 ( 785698 ) on Sunday August 18, 2013 @05:40AM (#44599021)

    you're 100% wrong. debts, like assets, first sit with the estate of the deceased. all assets are used to pay off debts, and then, what is left over is inheritance. an Estate can go into bankruptcy, the only way kids get hit with a "horrible mortgage that bankrupts them" is they were too foolish to put the estate into bankruptcy and give up the house, or too foolish to , you know, read the documents that said "hey, there is a mortgage against this home, taking the house involves taking over the mortgage".

This restaurant was advertising breakfast any time. So I ordered french toast in the renaissance. - Steven Wright, comedian

Working...