Protection From Online Eviction?

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?

Comments

Nuts

[EdIII]

What has happened here was not eviction. If we are going to use that word correctly, that is.

Evict (evicted, evicting, evicts) - To put out (a tenant, for example) by legal process; expel; Law to recover (property, for example) by a superior claim or legal process.

Tenant - One that pays rent to use or occupy land, a building, or other property owned by another.

Unless those people paid for a web hosting package, they have zero recourse and they cannot be evicted as they never paid a dime for anything. They should not have any either.

I am sure there was some sort of TOS agreed to that it was for free and no guarantees were going to be made to it's avaiabilbity, backups of data were the users responsibility, etc.

This seems to be some sort of insane sense of entitlement by some people. Some delusion that servers, data storage, and bandwidth are free. That once they find their place to squat that "they are owed" something by the people that actually own that space.

Huh?

That's ... ridiculous. "They've gone plaid".

It was a free service and the web hosting providers have every right to do whatever the hell they want. There is no 99.9999% uptime SLA. It's called, "It's free. So sit down, have a coke, and shut the fuck up" SLA.

The argument that there has to be some sort of socialist laws guarantying free and protected web space to the people is just nuts.

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.

Those people are parasites.

Re:Nuts

[EdIII]

Okay, politeness is nice and all. As long as we can agree it's not actually legally required.

This is not so much about AOL as it about and it is more about what the author of the article is stating. From the article, the gentleman makes it sound like a call to arms for the oppressed and downtrodden. He is making into some sort of social injustice issue and that only laws will force the web hosting providers into doing the "right thing".

So it would be in the best interest of those providing free services to treat their subscribers nicely since they get plenty of ad revenue from it. That's fine and dandy. It's just not legally required.

Re:Nuts

[m.ducharme]

You're forgetting something very important: the law does not require that one party pay money for a contract to exist, only that there is some consideration. If AOL is providing a service for free, then you're correct. But if AOL is providing a service in exchange for showing you ads, or data-mining your surfing habits, then you are paying for the service and AOL is bound by the terms of the contract. If those terms include clauses stating that notice has to be given, then AOL has to give notice. If not, then the user is shit out of luck, should have bargained harder.

Courts are very leery of making judgments on the value of the consideration (the price you pay) preferring to let contracting parties work out how much of what is worth the service or good contracted for, so I'm pretty confident that a judge would find that exposure to advertizing or data-mining would constitute sufficient consideration.

Also, in contract law there is the notion of unconscionability, specifically that where one party to the contract is grossly more powerful than the other, the court can make decisions in favour of the less powerful party that would otherwise run afoul of contract law. True bargaining only occurs between equals, and the law has long recognized that.

It's this principle that is the source of the renter's protection laws that you despise so much. Tenants get these protections because they would otherwise be powerless against their landlords, who could impose terms with impunity (pay up, or I'll throw you out on the street! And no, I won't get rid of those cockroaches! Too expensive!). You may not like it when poorer tenants are protected against their landlords, but I bet you don't object so much when you want to return something you bought under warranty. Warranty and consumer protection laws derive from the same principle of law.

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.

(note that of course, I am not a lawyer, this is not advice, blah blah blah.)

Why is this even an issue

[Rix]

You obviously have to have a local copy of your data at some point. Why are you deleting it?

Here we go again...

[dkf]

In the computer room at my college, many years ago, there was the following sign:

Rule 1: Always make a backup.
Rule 2: Always make a backup. (This is a backup of Rule 1)

Just because things are now on Web 2.0 services over the internet doesn't change the fundamental dictum. If you care about the data, it is you who needs backups. If you don't make backups, obviously you don't care (enough)...

Re:Here we go again...

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Please tell me there was another sign in the laundry room reading

Rule 3: Always make a backup ( This is an offsite backup of rule 1)

Remember MP3.com?

[mcrbids]

I remember MP3.com around the year 2000, when it was actually cool. Indie bands could post their music in any of zillions of genres, and you could listen with a click. I fell in love with one particular genre, the New Age genre, which consists of lots of trance tracks. But when MP3.com started down the "we host your CD library for you!" I knew that the game was about up and that they were about to be sued into oblivion (which happened), and wrote a bash/wget script to download everything I could of the MP3s. I still have this collection of MP3s today, almost 10 years later. In fact, I'm listening to it right now.

Aren't backups great?

If you care, take a look at the SLA. And if it's free, don't cry about not getting what you didn't pay for in the first place.