Slashdot Mirror
24/7 Sues DoubleClick Over Patent
whitefox writes "Another ZDNet article states that advertising network 24/7 has sued DoubleClick over patent infringement, this one for 'On-Line Interactive System and Method for Providing Content and Advertising Information to a Targeted Set of Viewers.' " The irony here is almost delicious.
*blue screen entertainment system*
You mean the X Box?
From day one, it was one big advertisement. Not a displayed ad, but its purpose was to show off what could be done with alphas in order to sell more of them.
I don't know how mnay it sold, but at the time it was quite impressive. The its use as a marketing ploy faded at around the same time that search sites & portals became hot, so . . .
I don't mind the advertising. The tracking really perturbs me. But what really gets me is the blinking. I've never filtered *anything* out just for being an ad. One blink, though . . .
.
I've seen a k6-200 brought to its knees by excessive blinking . .
And I do support the idea of a stealth cookie exchange . . .
Unfortunately, reality is another.
Profiling is most likely used to increase the prices gotten for selling mailing lists. Which may merely mean that the "valued" mailing lists get used more , thus meaning you get more junk mail, and possibly cluelessly so.
I bought something from "MacWarehouse" a couple years ago, so I'm now apparently profiled as a rabid buyer of MacOS material. Like clockwork, I get another catalogue from them every three to four weeks.
Parallel this with the "profiling" being done of "disaffected youth" in the aftermath of the Columbine shootings. For a little while there, the "mass opinion" was that anyone wearing a trenchcoat to school was a mass murderer about to be.
Even with more careful collection of information, the sorts of evidences that are visible enough to make useful 'profile' criteria are loose enough to result in horrendous "false positive" statistics. That is, the profiles will result in immense quantities of innocents being tagged as potential mass murderers.
If such crucial life-and-death matters can be gotten so wrong, why is it reasonable to expect that there will be more competence applied to the question of whether you are a good candidate for an ad for a new kind of feminine hygiene product?
It's quite funny that there's a lawsuit against the DoubleClick folks; it is not at all obvious what the resolution ought to be. There may be poetic justice involved, but it is entirely possible that a judgement against DoubleClick could be a bad legal result, representing an ill wind moving forwards...
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Would you prefer to pay for content than to view ads? Because content-oriented sites including /.) rely on ads to make money. Otherwise they will have to charge money for subscriptions -- or fold up shop and go home!
Point. However...
Advertisers (tv, web, etc) are doing you a favor by letting you view things for free.
This does not, however, give advertisers the right to track my behavior without my consent. If they want to show me ads, then fine, bring 'em on. But if they're going to track me, then I refuse to even see the ads in the first place. Is that such a bac thing?
That's why I filter out ads (I use WebFree on the MacOS side to do this; it's a great little program). If you can show me an ad company that makes no attempt whatsoever to track its viewers' behavior, I will gladly remove it from my block list. Until that happens, however, I'll be blocking every ad I come across.
Yeah, I looked into this a while back after I noticed a ton of those on all my masq servers. It turns out that they are asking for an echo in order to find out which is the closest server to spew the ad out to you. If you wanted to eliminate that I would imagine using ipchains (or ipfwadm if you're on a 2.0.36) and silently deny that port would stop the message, but they are still going to send the request each time a page is viewed with their ads. I dont have a current list of all the subnets that doubleclick has (they have quite a few to try to avoid filtering). It's annoying, but nothing fatal.
Is there a similar system for removing yourself from 24/7's system?
Yes:
Junkbuster
--
If we had a normal-sized salary cap for lawyers, I GUARANTEE this horendous chain-reaction of lawsuits would drop. The only people who are really benefitting are them. They go and encourage the corporations they work for by saying, "Hey, you can make a lot of money/get a business edge, by filing a lawsuit against Foo", then the lawyers at the other corporation say, "Hmm, this is going to be a big battle, we're going to need lots of funding to fight this one." Then the lawyers from both corporations meet at a fancy restaurant for drinks and toast to their successful squandering of otherwise useful capital.
Haven't you been keeping up with the hacker/cracker thing? If enough people commit a linguistic error, then the error becomes orthodox and correct! Hemos is just being a pioneer.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Think about this...
Patent the busness practace of sending e-mail to people who did not ask for it..
Patent the tactic of grabbing e-mail addresses from web sites and usenet for spam lists..
Then I chould charg a liccensing fee to everyone who spams.. "Oh my the way we own the patent for your advertising tecnique..."
I think it would be just ever so fun just to be able to send out legal notices...
Have the RBL work with me... Let them identify people who infring on my patent and I'll do the rest.
Who wants to step up and clame prior art? Ohh I'd be ever so understanding if they did... give up my patent AND give them free advertising... Yes I'll just put them up on my website for all the world to see.. Spam Hunters.. ISPs.. etc.. everyone will know who they are...
I want to patent Spam
I don't actually exist.
You know what, the web used to have a lot of very hight quality content on it -- and absolutely no ads. Maybe you weren't around back then, but you could actually find things with search engines like Yahoo and AltaVista. It was the power of that web that made me boggle at the possibilities.
Now we've got a lot more stuff. Amazon, portals, news sites, and (of course) /. Some of this is good, and some of it isn't. But keep this in mind: not everything has to make money. Maybe huge corporations have to make money at everything. And I know that web space doesn't come free. But if I pay my ISP $XXX a month, I get some web space and I can put up whatever I want. Maybe I put it up because I care about it, or think others might.
This is the kind of stuff I'd rather have. Stuff that people actually care about and do because they love. I'd rather read a website written by real people than a corporation any day.
-Esme
The sole purpose of the Internet is to get porn and bomb making plans into the hands of children.
I think I'll go patent the use of water to clean toliets.
-------
CAIMLAS
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
There is no way anyone will be able to use human genes in any practical sense before their patents expire. Let them go ahead and patent the genes. It lets them think that they're getting something useful enough to justify the enormous expense of sequencing the genes. Then they totally make up some possible function for the gene, which is almost guaranteed to be the wrong function. Then they get the patent applied for. After that, they do the actual research to find out what the gene is for, which takes many years.
By the time they have something useful like a drug that either enhances or supresses the funciton of the gene, the patent on the gene is about to expire, esp. since they probably said it was for something that it turns out that it doesn't actually do.
OK, then they have the patent expiry time on the drugs they developed, but they actually earned the patent there.
Net result: The gene sequence is published, along with what the actual use for it is, sometime within the patent period, but not near the beginning of it. The minimum time to get this research done is on order of 10 years. This isn't like 'Internet Time' here. This is acutally difficult to do.
Letting the companies get pretty much worthless patents (since they won't be able to further innovate the gene and renew their patent) is the only possible way to get the research done. It is extremely expensive to do this work.
So, within about 30 years, we'll be able to say with some confidence that we have the genome mapped correctly and no one will own the genome anymore. Remember that quite a few genes have multiple affects on how a person develops and some take 50-75 years to have any symptoms. This research is going to take a long, long time. The best way to speed it up is through cloning experiments, which are illegal.
Enough. I know this was offtopic. My on-topic opinion is that I hope that 24/7 sues the pants off of doubleclick and they both lost major amounts of money to legal fees. Meanwhile, I use Junkbuster.
You say that like it's a bad thing. What are you doing using free sites if you refuse to look at any advertising?
--
The shareholder is always right.
Perhaps I should use 'Socratic Irony': Was there a reason you cut-and-pasted the third dictionary source listed by www.dictionary.com, instead of the first (which supports my thesis)? Perhaps only your definition matters to you?
Or maybe I should adopt your mocking form of 'irony': I totally missed that bit about Hemos feigning ignorance in the story about DoubleClick. You're right. He certainly used the term properly.
How about this usage note fom The American Heritage Dictionary?
The words ironic, irony, and ironically are sometimes used of events and circumstances that might better be described as simply "coincidental" or "improbable," in that they suggest no particular lessons about human vanity or folly. Thus 78 percent of the Usage Panel rejects the use of ironically in the sentence In 1969 Susie moved from Ithaca to California where she met her husband-to-be, who, ironically, also came from upstate New York (though some Panelists noted that this particular usage might be acceptable if Susie had in fact moved to California in order to find a husband, in which case the story could be taken as exemplifying the folly of supposing that we can know what fate has in store for us). By contrast, 73 percent accepted the sentence Ironically, even as the government was fulminating against American policy, American jeans and videocassettes were the hottest items in the stalls of the market, where the incongruity can be seen as an example of human inconsistency.
Lastly, let's not confuse 'dramatic irony,' the leading of an audience to see incongruity (without the actors noting the incongruity); my off-topic rant is not ironic in the least.
[
Wrong.
The Internet is a fundamentally useful thing, an enabling technology that facilitates rich communication among individuals, groups, businesses, government agencies and constituencies. Everyone who needs this communication medium has a vested interest in ensuring that it continues.
I vehemently deny and attack the assertion that advertising is required to keep the Internet viable. Do I have to listen to ads every time I make a phone call? Has the phone network collapsed because of the lack of revenue from paid advertising over each and every call made? Would anyone in their right mind suggest that the phone company (in collusion with advertisers) track all of my phone calls, their length and the parties whom I was calling, all so that they could build a better consumer profile to target advertising to me? No, no, no, never in a million years. Even clueless cogresscritters can understand these points. Why should the Internet be any different? The Internet has rapidly become part of the basic communications infrastructure and as such will always be paid for because it fills a basic need.
Don't be confused by all of the rhetoric spewing from "content providers" who view the Internet as a broadcast entertainment medium. The Internet is not smart television! It is much more like the phone in that communication is two-way. I very much fear that that simple fact is being drowned by the rush of big interests to use it as a much more efficient means of information control.
Would you prefer to pay for content than to view ads? Because content-oriented sites including /.) rely on ads to make money. Otherwise they will have to charge money for subscriptions -- or fold up shop and go home! Advertisers (tv, web, etc) are doing you a favor by letting you view things for free
Just ignore the ads if you want, but don't ruin it for the rest of us by blocking out the advertisers that are paying for you to receive content for free -- because if too many start it will be the end of free content sites on the web. Or worse -- they will require special plugins to ensure ad views -- which will obviously be Windows only.
-rt-
-rt-
** Evil Canadians are taking over the world. Learn about the conspiracy
Lunch is not free and if advertisers aren't around to pay the bill, this big bad internet is down the tubes. The lack of earnings is already hurting the dot coms on the stock market and within a year consolidation will take out many of those startups too. So rail on the advertisers and wait for all your free this and free that. Oh but wait things aren't really free, someone pays for them, even if it's not you. I worry that the next generation won't be the internet generation, but the "entitled generation" which expects everything to be free. I hope I am wrong.
So complaining about advertisers as evil is like complaining about taxes and then taking the ability to drive on a well paved road as a right and not a privilege. I am as guilty of this too and I would be a hypocrit not to admit it. So hand me that "free" stuff and I'll look at their advertisements. Cause if they go out of business I can't get my free stuff anymore.
Careful you don't infringe on MS's patented BSOD illumination server.
I'm having trouble seeing any irony in this. I mean, it would be ironic if a company that filed a lot of silly patents was being sued for infringement, but Doubleclick wasn't doing that, were they? Sure they were tracking people and infringing on privacy, but that's a totally different and unrelated form of evil.
Wish Court TV provided nerdy cases like this, instead of all those murder trials. When these cases that can practicly bankrupt large and powerful companies on the net happen, they effect us all instead of some guy who shot 2 people in Hickville, (Insert State Here) Although these two are not the guys handling my tracking and banner ads I don't know which one i'd be rooting for, seeing that support for the lesser of two evils is still supporting evil.
English: Fry's 30 day money back guarentee
Advertisers (tv, web, etc) are doing you a favor by letting you view things for free ,to me, means people who put content on the web did it because they loved doing that, not making money.
Myth. Everytime you buy a product, you are payng for everything that goes into making product, Including advertising costs.
If you want extended channels(ones provided by cable and sat.) you pay. And still have advertising to watch!
As far as banner adverting on the web, I remember a time before advertising, and it seems to me that the web was a better place. 'better place'
Slashdot may stop makng money, and maybe go away if they didn't generate income with banner ads, but someone else would create something similiar. There have been boards like this longer then there has been advertising on the web.
I have always disliked banner ads, maybe because it marked a (in my opinion) negative turning point in the web. If I had always seen Banner ads maybe it wouldn't bother me as much
When they started tracking us is when I really started getting vocal about my opinion on banners.
If some made a billboard along the side of the road that tracked where my vehicle has been, I wouldn't like that either.
Just ignore the ads if you want
It is getting very difficult to ignore some of the banner ads. especially when they are so large, it has a noticable inpact on the speed of loading the site. I have dsl, and I will run into that problem time to time.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I'm preparing scrambled eggs, am I on a patent infringement?
Why do I feel an urge to patent a: "process of suing another company when they have done something that threatens to bring competition to a market".
I would make millions {evil grin}.
Hammer of Truth
That which you call irony is NOT irony.
It's coincidence, or meaningful juxtaposition. In Arsenio Hall's words, they're just things that make you go "hmm."
Irony is very rare. It's when things are OPPOSITES, CONTRASTED, and UNEXPECTED.
It was ironic that Ted Kaczynski thought the world would be a better place without technology, but he was caught when his UNABOMBer's Manifesto was published on the Internet. It was coincidence that it happened to be his own brother who recognized the writing and turned him in.
[
``We understand that a complaint was filed. We have not yet seen the complaint. However, based on our initial review of the patent, we believe that any claim of infringement would be baseless. We will defend ourselves vigorously.''
- Elizabeth Wang, DoubleClick's vice president and general counsel
They forgot to mention in the article... that she goes on to say "And anyone out there who wants to argue about it, we know where you live"
Hmm, there are ads here (and even if there weren't, we've still got "Advertising informaiton" in the form of reviews & individual posts), and Slashdot is definitely targeting a certain set of viewers. You know what this means? No more Slashdot! Or Freshmeat, for that matter! Or CNN, or Fatbrain, or Microsoft home page....
Then again, maybe the patent's not that bad....
-Denor
i don't mind the ads, but it is the idea of tracking my movements on the Net that I hate.
So opt out of the DoubleClick tracking system by setting your DC ID# to "OPT_OUT". (You can do that from the User Friendly strip's home page.) That way, DC can still serve ads and make the web site freebeer, but DC can't track your "pr0n in one window, Pinocchio on Gutenberg in another, Precious Moments on eBay in a third" surfing habits.
I am an exit.Will I retire or break 10K?
In another perspective, regular TV and cable bombards us with ads, but these folks can only guess at who we are and sometimes don't even realize we're watching (that is why when I watch the Canandian channels, I get to see the MOLSON-I AM CANADIAN ad). Or if I watch THE VIEW on ABC, there's a panapoly of ads for makeup, kids videos, shampoo for women, etc. all targeting the housewife market. I don't mind these ads, since I realize the TV stations have to make money from somewhere.
My solution to the problem is that I regularly hose the cookie file on my box every so often. It gets the job done at least.
On the other hand, I get a chuckle from some of the ads that I do see, especially when I see ads for PAMPERS and LINUX products and outdoor paraphernalia in the same browing session. I have to wonder what my profile at one of these marketing houses looks like...
This is another view of the world.
Going to DoubleClick's opt-out page is the lame way to handle this because you still end up playing by their rules.
They waste your time making you go to a page to opt out of a system they shouldn't have put you in in the first place, and then THEY STILL SHOW YOU ADS.
The right way to spend your time is setting up the JunkBuster HTTP proxy, which screens out both ads and cookies from offending sites such as doubleclick and anyone else you put on your list.
The JunkBuster HTTP proxy is GPL'ed. You can get it at http://www.junkbuster.com/.
Good day, This is a bit off topic but it deals with DoubleClick. I run port sentry on my home network(on a linux box that is acts as a proxy uesing Socks) any way port sentry logs any one that tyrs to connect to me and on several ocation I have noted that some IP that is regersted with DoubleClick will try to connect to port 7 (echo port), they start at about 1:00amCST and go till 3 or 4am some time up to 200 trys a night. I do not have any logs of this anymore (I think I sent it to them once never herd back) has any one seen this type of thing befor??
On-line interactive system and method for providing content and advertising information to a targeted set of viewers
I'm sorry, but all of this privacy stuff sounds like paranoia to me. I'd be happy if companies that I might actually be interested in could get their ads to me, rather than companies I couldn't care about.
The junk mail I get from "Windows Magazine" or "Windows NT Administration Conferences" or home furnishing catalogs or other BS I don't want.
If there's a product I might be interested, I wouldn't mind hearing about it. In fact, I'd be happy to fill out a detailed profile survey if it would keep companies (whom I'm not interested in) from wasting my time.
Murray Todd Williams
I want to patent something, and I understand that to get your patent accepted, all you have to do is put "On-line" in front of it!
..."
How about this:
"An On-line method of keeping and modifying a journal corresponding to entries in the Gregorian calendar. This method, comprising a transaction processing front-end, a database back-end, a Gregorian calendar lookup module,
Or this:
"An On-line method of providing illumination on demand. This method, comprising of a Java Servelet that responds to specific user-defined input by displaying a pre-specified color and intensity of light..."
Gosh, the possibilities... Now that it's online, it's a new idea! Can we take this further?
"A method of holding drinks and keeping them cool while in the garage."
Wow, now that we're in the garage, suddenly it's a new patent! I love the US Patent System!
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I hope everyone's used the Opt-out link for Double-Click at http://www.doubleclick.net/optout/.
Is there a similar system for removing yourself from 24/7's system?
http://james.mcglinn.org/