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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."
I see a concerning tendency in these discussions for people who normally seem to understand that the other people cannot be allowed to dictate how we run our computers, to suddenly label this sort of software as evil.
Just like I will not allow the movie industry to be in control over my computer when I watch a DVD, and the Publishing industry cannot be in control of my computer/palmtop when I read a book, the Internet's website publishers have NO right to demand that I view their sites in any particular manner. Software that replaces adds with others, or software that adds links to websites, has as much a right to exist as any other software. If I choose to run it, then it is my freedom to do so - if you do not like people being able to read your documents while replacing the adds, I would suggest you stop putting your content on the web in the first place - not that you demand that web browsers should suddenly serve you rather than the person browsing.
User agents must serve the user and only the user. Demanding that browsers serve the interests and expectations of website publishers is in no way different from demanding that DVD players serve the interests and expectations of the MPAA, and that MP3 player serve the interests and expectations of the RIAA. The concept that of these "User Hostile" agents is the basis for the future that those who are attacking Freedom on the Internet are planning. If we value freedom and self determination in the information age, we cannot in any case condone and support an attitude that preaches that software is responsible to anybody except the person using it - even when it is the form of sleazy marketing.
That said, there is of course a more sinister angle to what these programs are doing - that is that they sneak their way into peoples computers without people realizing it. That we should not condone - but let us face it, it will be impossible to get away from as long as people are using software written without the intentions of the user in mind. We already have the solution to that problem, it is called Free Software, and there is enough of it to cover every computing need. When was last time you got a piece of spyware off apt-get?
So in closing, do not confuse the issues here:
- Programs installing functionality the user didn't ask for or want = BAD
- Programs doing what they (and presumable the user, given the previous) wants rather than what the website owner/music company/film company/book publisher/etc wants = GOOD
As always, there is a flip side to this. If this is made unlawful, that would probably apply to filtering/adbusting proxies as well; for the content providers there isn't much of a difference between replacing their ads and removing them. And once you're down that slippery slope, you could see blocking graphics, disallowing popups or animated gifs or even having your own typeface as intruding upon the websites' rights. This could conceivably mean that websites could legally demand that users use only a certain browser in only its standard configuration, whether the site would work with other setups or not.
I think the problem with this software isn't what they do, but the fact that they are being deployed in a dishonest way. Most people getting them installed will have no idea they are doing that, and they don't give paople an easy way of removing them. The dishonesty stems mainly from the fact that the users are installing an application to do one thing, and these change an unrelated application without this fact being advertised as part of the description of the original application.
/Janne
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
These three things are illegal to distribute today:
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")