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‘And your firstborn, if any’
YAHOOS are introduced by Jonathan Swift in his Gulliver's Travels as "a species of animals utterly incapable of amendment by precept or example". Gulliver's horse-like master or captor "was convinced... that I must be a Yahoo; but my teachableness, civility, and cleanliness, astonished him".
The servants drive a herd of Yahoos into the field, laden with hay
Yahoo!, in contrast, is a web portal, email provider and publisher of Yahoo! News.
In that last capacity it offered a colleague £250 for a photo shoot, and provided a contract that included the following:
Yahoo EMEA Limited will be the exclusive owner of all right, title and interest in and to the Works on creation, including all results and proceeds of Provider's services under this Agreement, whether specified here or not. If title and interest in the Works cannot, by operation of law, vest in Yahoo EMEA Limited on creation, Provider irrevocably and unconditionally transfers and assigns to Yahoo EMEA limited as at the date of creation (and without further consideration}, free and clear of any charges, encumbrances and rights exercisable by third parties and with full title guarantee (and where the subject matter is copyright, by way of present assignment of present and future copyright) all of its right, title and interest (including all intellectual property rights) in and to any Works without further consideration. Provider will give to Yahoo EMEA Limited and/or its designees all reasonable assistance and execute all documents necessary to perfect, preserve, register or record its right in any Works. Provider will not be entitled to any additional compensation in connection with any distribution, exhibition, broadcast, other use and/or exploitations of the Works unless expressly provided for in the Agreement or required by law. The termination, suspension or expiration of this Agreement for any reason whatsoever shall not affect Yahoo EMEA Limlted's ownership of the Works. Yahoo has the tight to edit, revise or make any other changes to any Work. Provider Irrevocably waives in favour of Yahoo EMEA limited any rights in and to the Works that cannot be legally assigned to Yahoo EMEA limited under this Agreement (including any moral rights or rights of integrity or the like). Provider also grants to Yahoo the irrevocable right to use Provider's name, trademarks, likeness, persona and biography in connection with the Works; however, Yahoo will have no obligation to do so.
As we noted, it's quite distinct from the cruel Swiftian satire.
We do confess some surprise at not finding the words "and your firstborn, if any" in the contract; but our brains ran out of our ears before we could read any more than the above.
What would Swift have made of it? Maybe he would have been insufficiently bothered: we find an example of him discovering, the hard way, the need to enforce copyright and moral rights.
In 1732 one of Swift's contemporaries, Alexander Pope, wrote to another, John Gay, noting that the Dublin bookseller Benjamin Motte "and another idle fellow, I find, have been writing to the Dean [their nickname for Swift], to get him to give them some copy-right, which surely he will be not so indiscreet as to do".
In a 2018 paper for the UC Irvine Law Review, "Copyright as a Property Right? Authorial Perspectives in Eighteenth-Century England" Simon Stern reports that:
As it happens, Swift was indiscreet enough to let Motte publish the book, and the result fully justified Pope’s concerns. In a letter to Motte, Swift... complained that he had not expected to find some long-forgotten “humorous or satirical trifles” in the volume; that the volume erroneously credited him with material by others... and that, worst of all, Motte had included some pieces whose authorship Swift had managed to disclaim up until then.
If only Swift had heeded Pope's further warning that it "would be silly in him to give a copy-right to any, which can only put the manner of publishing hereafter out of his own and his friend’s power into that of mercenaries".
Our 20th-century colleague reports that after "a bit of back and forth on the contract, the person I was dealing was so far junior to the lawyers that I guess I ended up too much hassle for them by questioning it". They were "incapable of amendment" and the job presumably went to someone less "discreet".