But the site I worked for went live in 1999 (I started there in 2002) and the founder had definitely stolen ours from Geocities, and everybody else had suspiciously similar versions. The versions went through a lot of hands, but Geocities was the original Linear A.

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(The working theory was "we can't afford to pay lawyers, Geocities is the site owned by a large enough company that it can pay lawyers that anyone can think of, we'll just use theirs". Blogger was another common source, but I think they stole theirs from Geocities too before Google bought them.)

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But yeah, it depends on which particular time period you're talking about, and everybody changed their version slightly to cover their own features and all, but from around 1998-2006 or so, whenever anyone started a new site, they just grabbed the ToS we all originally stole from Geocities.

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Yeah, I often call registering a designated agent with the copyright office the brown M&Ms of the user-generated content world: if a site hasn't done it, it's the warning sign that they don't know a lot of other things they need to be doing either.

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Having been there: it was Geocities. We all stole Geocities'.

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