Still More Advertising Links

An Anonymous Coward writes: "MSNBC.com has the latest on the controversial Smart Tags technology that got punted from Windows XP. This time it's not Microsoft doing the dirty deed, but a couple of 3rd-party companies. And they already have 500,000 users installed. I can see the lawyers salivating already."

Comments

NOT Same story as posted on Aug 18...

[discovercomics]

The older article was about an overlaying of banner adds on a page by a company that produces a password keeper program. Users were often unaware of what the program was doing.
BR>This new story is about two different programs who are disfiguring pages with colors and links and then selling keywords which in some cases are to porn sites..

RTFATWLBYPSS

Re:Add this to your web sites...

[Amezick]

But they aren't modifying the website. They are modifying the interface that is used to view the website. I really don't see how this is illegal. The content owners might be upset but nothing is happening to them. They are assuming that everyone is viewing their site through a browser. What if I wrote a program that monitored their pages for content, DL'd it, and presented to me in a more consise format. This wouldn't be illegal I don't think. They put out content, I use it. Do they have any actual control over how I make use of it for myself only?
--Angus

Virtual Republication

[ProfessorPuke]

This brings up an emerging legal problem that the politicians haven't quite got their teeth into yet- if the DMCA et al provide the intellectual property industry with protection against unauthorized redistribution, should it be legal to evade that restriction by moving the point of redistribution to the client side?

These three things are illegal to distribute today:

• A Wall Street Journal article with the ads removed, or replaced with your own ads.
• A PNG combining the top 20 new webcomics for that day, suitable for printing.
• A copy of StarWars ep 1 with JarJar edited out.

Yet the author of each piece of modified content could get around that law by only giving out a program that, when run from the end-viewer's computer, uses a legally obtained copy of the unmodified content and then creates a locally modified version with the desired changes. (There are technical obstacles to applying this technique to each of those examples, but they're surmountable).

At no point was copyright law broken- but as a software engineer will tell you, deciding which part of a system should go on the client and on the server is an implementation detail that should be decided by technical performance concerns, not legalisms about which piece of data you can copy where.

To the end-user, the result looks exactly the same either way ("Hey! They just waved to JarJar, and kept right on walking!"), so why should one implementation be less legal than the other?

(This situation is rather like an inverted version of the "GPL ASP loophole")

In meatspace this would be flyposting or vandalism

[new500]

. .

claiming this is just leeching risks appearing like a whiner to the few lusers who are actually pleased at some other (possibly illicit)functionality they received wth their viral browser plug in.

Putting up yet more terms and conditions on my web site doesn't sound like any fun or use. It's no news that reader's initial attention span and patience with a new site is short. So making them read a whole treatise, or - possibly worse because there's not lkely to be a back link to your referring page - diverting visitors to another site so they can read up on the plague, doesn't sound good either.

I presume these things work on a standard browser plug in architecture. You can detect Flash and other plug ins with javascript. Why not Top Text and all this crap, the politiely divert visitors with the offending code to a page that says actually does given them the info on what is going on, and that reminds them that in your eyes and in the eyes of many reasonable content producers, they are keeping very bad company indeed, and may not presently view your work.

I would feel just fine casting Top Text plug in vistors away from my site. For all the talk of legal remedies, involving parasitic behaviour or any more subtle arguments that have been put forth to me this the web equivalent of fly posting? If my web site were physical these people could be arrested for criminal damage.

I'm sure I could think of a few nicer arguments such as destruction of trade dress, contributory misrepresentation, alteration of registered trademarks (which is protected) and who knows what else. To someone who mentioned this elsewheer, this is likely _not_ a direct and clear copyright violation, as - on one point at least - the user is modifying your work only for their on use.

The basis on which the providors of such leechware could be sued for copyright infringment I am not clear. This is a grey area because of the free will aspects, free distribution of the offending leechware (though if this was directly sold you coudl claim copyright breach with intent to pander or profit therefrom which would be serious) and in essense the keyword advertisers are only paying for modifications to the code of a freely distributed "gift". Has anyone thought if these leechware things update themselves automatically? That might at least indicate the producers of this crap were _actively defacing_ website properties, and that they were n control and not the viewer / luser/

So until there's a legal remedy, is there a technological one : can I filter visitors by plug in or whether they have this crap installed?

He he, I guess you could quickly sell your defeater code to a bunch of upset content providors.

Isn't this rather like the guys who claimed they could sell a $50 box that's blank all the ads on tv, hyped it and sold the "defeaters" tosome channel for $x MLN?? I mean, are these people making a packet outta these keywords, does anyone know?

Hmm, maybe I can sue microsoft (no really)

[RomulusNR]

I had an extremely similar idea back in 1995 while I was working for Inso (now EBT) in their electronic references group (now long gone). Basically I envisioned a system where news stories would be automatically populated with links around recognizable terms (proper names, scentific words and terms, historic events, etc). Of course, in my much more socially beneficial idea, those links would point to articles in online (subscription-based) versions of our reference products, like the Cambridge Encyclopedia, the New Heritage Dictionary, and the Information Please Almanac.

Unfortunately none of this became reality (I hear even the project I was working on when I thought of this ended up just being merged with ESPN SportZone). I wonder if I have any copies of my prototype for this.