Slashdot Mirror
Gator-style Overlay Ads Are Legal, Says Court
donutz writes "C|Net has the scoop: "A federal court has ruled that pop-up ads for rivals of U-Haul International, placed atop the moving company's own site by a third-party software application, are legal." In this case, it was ad serving company WhenU.com placing the ads, but this decision could have a big impact on the court cases that involve competitor Gator."
If I want to install something to replace (or remove!) ads, I should be allowed to. It's my computer. But, it's something the user should have clear and full knowledge of ahead of time. I think Gator, et al, are guilty of not being completely honest with users about what they're up to.
Watch Fox News and you'll see commercials for CNN ("Tonight on Larry King Live..."). Time Warner sticks on whatever commercials it wants to. I'm sure there are Fox News commercials on CNN ("Tonight on Hannity and Colmes...").
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
Makes sense.
I can replace ads with pictures of the countryside or kittens, so why not ads with different ads if I so choose, it's my desktop.
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
No, because you don't own the billboards.
However, If you buy a magazine, you are perfectly free to paste any other ads over the ads printed in your copy of the magazine. After all, it's your property.
Yeah.. That's exactly what those terrorists are thinking. Damn I hate the US because of all those pop up ads, especially when I visit www.aljazeera.net and all these damn pop up adds come up for www.usdoj.gov. I think I'll go blow myself up.
Can you say broad generalization?
The rest of the world hates the US because we are the last remaining super power.. and every unpopular kid on the block wants to de-thrown the king.
Because it means that you are allowed to control what is displayed on your own computer.
Here's why this decision is good. If third party software is allowed to replace the ads on a web page, then it is certainly legal for you to remove ads from the web pages you see. This decision strongly protects ad-blocking software, and that's a good thing.
-Placing icons on the desktop that launch ad-filled web pages
-Adding itself as a favorite or a home page to the browser
-Adding shortcuts to the Start Menu
All without permission of the user. Granted, those who are security-aware will have unsigned ActiveX and Scripting capabilities turned off (discussion of this can be found here, but then again, the crowd that is more concerned with these types of exploits will use browsers that are harder to exploit and easier to control, such as Mozilla, Opera, or Communicator. Not that these programs are all exempt from exploitation, but they have proven to be a much smaller target audience.
I am Pepsi. I pay a software company to create software that finds coke cans in movies and alter them to Pepsi cans. No more than an "ad" does. The customer has "control" of his tv. And what appears.
Imagine watching a Nascar race and seeing the "home depot" car with the "Home Depot" logo covered by the "Target" logo via software. I really am not sure what the legal difference between TV and Computer screens would be. My cable company may be the next purveyor of "ads"....
It is one thing if you yourself block ads using your hosts file or some program, but this program did quite the opposite. When you browse the Web, it adds additional advertisements to Web sites you are visiting, and displays ads for competitors. 99.9% of the idiots who install Gator or other software don't read the EULA or even understand that this other software is being installed as well.
Think about it this way. You have a business selling computer parts. Someone goes to your site, and then all of the sudden they get a popup ad going straight to a competitor of yours. This can hamper your ability to make a sale with your customer and impacts you financially. It's a Bad Thing(TM).
It isn't right, and it is unfortunate that the judge ruled this way.
It should only be illegal if they force you against your will to wear said glasses. Then again, forcing people to do things against their will is generally illegal as is.
If you wore rose coloured glasses, and the linux ads were in red but MS ones in blue, would be have to ban those too?
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Well, to be fair Gator and its ilk usually gets installed in the background as part of some other operation that the user is involved in. I really do doubt that many users go to the gator site and say to themself "Self! This program will change how I use the Internet! Why doesn't everybody have this program!"
It comes in the background with KaZaa or some other P2P shit or even on those nefarious websites that download software by praying on the "click OK" instinct that everybody has on the Internet
No, the judges just got the wrong plantiff in front of them. U-Haul can't sue saying Joe User was tricked into installing software he didn't want, Joe User has to file that case.
the Internet-enabled computer desktop is a competitive medium, where (advertisers) can impact consumer-buying
Gee, and here I was thinking is was my workspace!?!
just goes to show how these guys think eh?
1. Control Websites
2. ???
3. Profit!!!
How about:
1. Control Websites.
2. Try to get companies to pay so their websites aren't shut down.
3. A little profit, and a lot of complaints.
4. Get sued.
5. Go out of business.
I sure hope so at least
- "Nobody came out that night, not one was ever seen. But Old Man Stauf is waiting there, crazy sick and mean!"
IANAL, but I seem to recall that for there to be a contract, both parties must knowingly consent to it, and there must be consideration (value) in both directions. If in fact gator is installed surreptitiously, and if gator.com knows this and fails to take measures to prevent it, I think a case could be made that they are in guilty of trademark infringement by placing pop-ups that fraudulently appear to be condoned by the unwitting website beneath them.
Or maybe not. *shrugs*
Your site, your content, your visitors. If someone pays you to run ads based on your content then those are the ads viewers should see. Your advertising clients are paying for your product.
How long before someone builds spyware that rearranges the content to put ads where there weren't any ads before?
Of course, I thought Disney would've lost for the non-ending patent rights.
riding round the world on an old motorcycle
I know spam, popups, etc are annoying, but I'm dubious that legal approaches are a good way to fix them. Often, as is the case with censorship (IMHO, of course), it may seem like a good idea to ban something in the short term, but bad in the long run -- and in any case, the whole concept of windows, etc, may not be around in a few years.
I'd generally rather see technical solutions, rather than legal ones, to problems on the 'Net. Legal solutions tend to not work well for mere annoyances (since people don't actually do anything, which results in laws that people simply ignore), simply cause more money to be thrown at lawyers, are slow to adapt with the times, may stifle honest-to-God positive things, tend to promote the deployment of "fragile" protocols/software (which may break when someone who doesn't care about the law comes along), and run into problems since legal boundaries (along cities, states, nations, etc) don't make much sense on the 'Net. If at all possible, I'd prefer to go with technical solutions to problems, to simply do things properly. Popups are a pretty easy thing to fix from a technical standpoint.
Just my 2 cents.
Use Python
Although the argument both for and against the presence of competitors ads have some merit the fundamental issue is still personal choice.
I run a business, my ad is in the yellow pages along with everybody else who is in the same line of work. Why is it that despite the fact that I am surrounded by the ads of others (mostly bigger than mine) I have a larger market share in my area? A rhetorical question to which I'm sure we all know the answer to, my service is better and my prices are fair.
The decision to use a company is still based on choices made on the basis of information provided... NOT on the the basis of 'I saw you first'. You cannot call "Shotgun" in the business world and expect everybody to agree. The solution for these companies is to make sure that people still choose their service or product, even after they have been exposed to all the other available options. This is the USA, there is never going to be someone telling you that you are not allowed to be the best.
Go ahead run your ads anywhere you like in my local yellow pages. My company is the best. If these companies cant handle the competition then maybe they should check what they can do better within their company rather than attempting to call 'shotgun' and make their competitors go away!
It is easier to square the circle than to get round a mathematician. A.De Morgan 1872
This kind of mindless crap will make fair internet advertising useless. If the reverse is also legal then we should start some kind of .org to list and use netware to hack the services and software that will need to be driven off the net. Microsoft might even get smart and help for a change!
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
Of course, if you make Gator illegal then you would basically make any pop-up blocking software illegal as well (since they also modify a page by deleting certain content).
Stupidity is no defense. If you download/install software and don't understand that there may be spyware / adware installed you have no-one to blame but yourself.
"It's be interesting to put together an Active X control that just annoys the crap out of anyone that downloads it, and includes a Gator-like EULA.
Maybe Judges, legislators, etc, would consider the consequences a little more if every half hour they get a pop-up on their screen with words similar to "You're an ass!", "Screw you, loser", and "Rebooting now, and there's nothing you can do about it either, because YOU agreed to the EULA, moron!"
So, a virus would be legal so long as it had a click this EULA?
UNREAL!
On the upside, this ruling also would seem to make it completely legal to use AD BLOCKING software, as well as browsers that block popups.
I use Opera, and frankly get AMAZED how shitty the web is when IE is used.
Corporatism != Free Market
That's a bad analogy. What you described (vandalism) would occur if someone hacked into the server and replaced the banner ads. This case would be more like building another billboard right in front of the U-haul one thus blocking it. Assuming you own the land, that's perfectly legal and acceptable. Seems like the judge made the proper conclusion in this case.
Don't you think that's a slightly biased test?
Tech savvy people run the Internet (hence make more webpages).
Tech savvy people use Linux more often than the general populace.
Therefore more webpages exist about Linux.
It could just be a very outspoken minority. I would trust the results of a random phone survey more than I trust a Google search in this case.
"Nothing shocks me. I'm a scientist." -Indiana Jones
I can't touch your billboard, just like I can't hack into the ad server and replace your ads with one of my own.
However, if I design a windshield that detects the presence of your billboards and superimposes another image over it, such that your billboard has a different message, that's fine. The only difference is, it's a lot easier to do this online than in real life.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
To insert them, it has to alter the HTML returned by a webserver as it passes through...essentially, it's a proxy server that munges content to insert ads. There are other proxy servers (WebWasher comes to mind as an example) that do the opposite--they examine the HTML they receive and alter it to remove ads, scripts, and other nastiness. Since your browser will also issue an HTTP GET request for the extra ads, ad-filtering proxies that work by redirecting certain types of requests (Squid can do this) should still be effective as well...you just need to create another rule to block your ISP's ad server.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
That's the whole point. There are those who would argue that Gator is just as much a virus or trojan as anything else. In my opinion, it certainly has an effect on people's computers like one.. It's installed in the background. It runs in the background transparently. Its meant never to be seen or detected; in fact, it's designed such that you don't even know you've installed it. It degrades the performance of your computer and hijacks your CPU cycles for its own purposes. It crashes machines frequently. If I remember correctly, it opens up a hole in your network to report back to its home server. It's nothing more than a virus with a business plan.
"Choose to wear" is a different issue. In fact, I choose to run all the web pages I view through one of several filters, depending on what OS I happen to be using at the time. In theory, gator users have chosen gator as their "filter".
While I think gator is a PITA, I also think that anyone who does a little research will find it easy enought to not to use gator if they don't want to.
Give gator et. al. their due...Think about the light bulb that lit up over someone's head: "Hey--we can write a filter proxy. But instead of taking the ads out--we can put ads in! And we can sell ad space that our audience will see when they view the web pages of our clients competitors! We'll make millions [angry with us]. Mwuahahahaha..." Wish I'd thought of it.
I think this is a good decision. I would find it disconcerting to hear the courts say that I must view a web page as its author intended. I get to choose how I view something. If I want to read a magazine back to front, I get to choose. If I want to filter the web content I view, I get to choose
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
Oh god, you're so repressed. You have a billing dispute with the company that could probably be solved with a telephone call to customer service to get your money (and yes, probably terminate your account), but you'd rather turn it into a righteous crusade? Shit, I've given refunds twice that on my first week of customer service jobs.
Get over your damn self.
Users who have Gator on their machines against their will may have a computer intrusion case, under federal "exceeds authorized access" computer crime laws, but that wasn't what was litigated here.