Web Publishers Sue Gator

shofmann writes "The Washington Post is reporting that a number of publishers, including the Washington Post, is suing Gator Corp. over their obnoxious spyware, saying that Gator is "a parasite that free rides on the hard work and investment" of other people's web sites. The lawsuit alleges that Gator's spyware contributes to trademark infringement, misappropriation of the news, and represents unfair competition." The publishers seem to be distressed about Gator replacing website ads with its own. Several people submitted this related article about blocking internet advertising - nothing really new here for geeks, but a good URL to send to your less technically-inclined friends.

Comments

Illegality

[Rupert]

• It is legal for you to tape Farscape so you can watch it later.
  
• It is legal for you to pay me to come to your house, pop the tape in the VCR, and record Farscape for you.
  
• It is illegal for you to pay me to tape Farscape at my house, and mail you the tape.
  

Since this is happening at the client end, I think this is closest to the second option above, which would make it legal.

Re:Gator sucks, but...

[JanneM]

I agree with you in general. This issue has some additional wrinkles, however. The users are clearly not fully aware what Gator does or when it does it. Gator does not mark in any way that it changes content. By switching like this _without_ the user being aware of it, they can reasonable be said to misrepresenting the web site owners.

Put it this way: if you had a program that changed banners, that you installed _knowing_ that's what it did, and it showed you ads for steamy porn on nytimes.com, there would be no problem. You knew after all that the banners came from your program, not from the New York Times. In this case, however, the intent is to do this behind peoples' backs. If it pushed goatse.cx advertisements onto nytimes site, a lot of people would be very angry at nytimes, thinking its they who pushed the stuff on them.

It's not that it changes the 'surfing experience', it's that it does it with intent to deceive that's the problem.

/Janne