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Nationwide Class Action Filed Against DoubleClick
Stanley Ference continues: "The class action complaint alleges that DoubleClick deceptively and fraudulently commandeered millions of Internet users to the commercial websites of DoubleClick's customers through dissemination of tens-of-millions of fraudulent Internet advertising banners that impersonated computer system messages. The Complaint states that through use of such Fake User Interface ("FUI") dialogs that fraudulently represented themselves as computer system error messages, DoubleClick tricked millions of Internet users into interrupting the work they were performing to respond to the fraudulent system message, only to unexpectedly find both computer and computer user thus hijacked to commercial websites of DoubleClick's customers.
Additional information about this lawsuit, including an illustration of the advertising banners that are the subject of this lawsuit, may be found at ferencelaw.com/doubleclick."
Here's a link to the press release (PDF) announcing the filing of this lawsuit.
And when I see signs when I'm on the freeway saying there are once in a lifetime deals at a car dealer I get off the road right away... The advertising practices suck - but I think it should be the FTC dealing with it not class action lawsuits. Doubleclick can't afford to loose - it just isn't going to happen IMHO.
--
draziw - +3 karma for low user id
last heard at doubleclick "awww fui"
So I don't have one new message waiting for me?
False advertizing is false advertizing, and half of all popup ads are unequivocably that.
Repeal the DMCA!
It looks a lot like lawsuits are the new "bubble" industry. Anyone complaining about being an out of work IT consultant should look to writing the bar (after the difficult MSCE exam the bar should be breeze =:-) and joining the lawsuit frenzey.
" If you've ever been tricked by one of those ads telling you that your "connection is not optimized" or that you have "1 new message waiting," you could be part of the class
You can be part of the the Class action if you are willing to admit that you are stupid.
Click now to discover whether YOU are eligible for a part of the MULTIMILLION payoff against DoubleClick!!!
Yes, you too can be part of the twenty-first century "I'M SO STUPID I DESERVE MONEY" movement.
Click now and receive $$$'s!!! (*)
* Subject to reality.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
It's not going to be easy to get people to sign up really, to admit that they were computer illeterate enough not to be able to tell the difference between a real system message and a web page and/or don't know how to disable pop up ads in mozilla. However, given the litigous nature of many people, I'm sure that there will be even some Mac users claiming that the Win32 GUI is close enough that they just didn't notice...
Beep beep.
i dont see what all the fuss is all about. double click is awesome gum. great flavour let me tell you.
Whats the point of a cure for cancer or aids? Most people who need it and dont have the money wont be able to afford it.
For me to get into this class action lawsuit I have to admit that I am a dumb ass and was tricked by a "FUI" ...
man
No manual entry for
can i sue slashdot for tricking me in to looking for ..
valuable insights and content and yet finding
cmdrtaco?
is there an IQ test or something?
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
How many of us here on slashdot are going to get tricked in this manner? For those of us on Mac or *n*x systems the difference is obvious.
Banana-fanna-fo-FUI
Me My Mo-MUI
GUI!
*sigh*
You mean I WASN'T selected out of a worldwide to win a chance to possibly be entered into a drawing to win a raffle?
503 Sig Unavailable
The Signature could not be accessed. Please try again later or contact the administrator
I may not like what doubleclick does, but we can't protect anyone from clicking a banner ad any more than we can prevent fat people from eating at McDonald's or coffee generally being served **HOT**.
At least these ads don't cause bodily harm and they keep large portions of the internet free.
Of course, California will pass a law - like they always do - trying to protect their citizens from their own stupidity. They have the majority rule mindset, not the leave me alone mindset. Just look at their smoking laws!
My mother was sitting there clicking one of those ads for about 15 minutes and closing out the new window every time it opened. The reason? It said "Click OK to close this window." I was commandeered into showing her that you have to click the little X button to close out the window. Maybe I'm biased, but I'm glad they're finally getting sued for taking advantage of the people that are, shall we say, less-than-knowledgeable internet users.
Lets see how well they take on the Gnome Desktop Enviornment GUI. Oh wait. All professional GUI desingers went insane on seeing the look of the file dialog.
...coupons for brain transplants might be a more just settlement.
It's all well and good asking for people who have been fooled by these, but to be fair, how many people who ever have thought those things were genuine are likely to ever find out about this action?
Oh well, at least if I get part of the settlement I can start buying some of those penis pills and russian brides everyone keeps telling me about. I mean honestly, I don't even know half of these people. I guess I just met em at a party or something, but they seem to have gotten my name confused with someone elses. Jesus, you'd think I was on some kind of mailing list or something.
Mod Points: Helping you keep your opinion to yourself.
They're gonna loose. If people have a case against fast food restaurants for making them fat i think they'll have a case against people actually trying to fool their fat-asses.
If there is one constant in this world, it's people's stupidity and i know that most people have clicked those at least once, twice, maybe even a few times.
It's kinda funny that the whole case depends on people prooving how stupid they are.
----
Go canucks, habs, and sens!
All of this, of course, was on his KDE desktop... (no, I've no idea why he had pop-ups enabled.)
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Finally... someone is watching out for the stupid!
"Lord, grant that I may always be right, for Thou knowest that I am hard to turn" -- A Scots-Irish prayer
..Only because I want them to change their advertising practices to get away from the egregious misleading practices that most of the vendors they push ads for concoct.. ..I don't care if you want to pop an ad up about performance parts for my car if I happen to be on a tuner website looking at mods for my car. What I don't agree with is all those 'your connection is not optimized' crapola that they flash at me when I'm say, reading tomshardware. That stuff IS blatantly misleading and would be equivalent in the real world to setting up a billboard on the side of the BQE and stating something to the effect of 'If you're driving a chevy, your brakes are wearing down at an alarming rate! Pull over and call Bob's car parts NOW, or you will DIE, mouthbreather!!'...
..I hope they smack those bastards, I really really do..
That kind of advertising is a classic ploy praying on people who are ignorant of the real working of the technology being pushed and used.
Are your brakes less than optimal? Well sure, if you've taken the car out of the driveway in the last six months, hell even if its been driven off the truck that brought them to the dealership.. That does NOT mean that my brakes are going to fail that very moment and that by not following the ad to the product I'm in some sort of imminent doom..
Especially when it resembles a Windows UI.
I mean it's buying "Penis Enlargment" from spammers or something.
Oh! Great! It say "1 message waiting" I have a new message! Hooray!!!
Slashdot Sig. version 0.1alpha. Use at your own risk.
all i have to do to maybe get some cash is claim that i'm stupid? hrm... a difficult claim to make, indeed!
They have the majority rule mindset
Well, the very NERVE! "Majority rule" has NO place in a democracy!
I dont understand why they have to fake the AD's. Just give me something I'd click.
Barely clothed Hot chicks. They could have them hold Linux distros with headlines like "Real men use this distro" or "How hard is your Hardware".
Hey, how many of you checkout a vendor just because of a cute Booth Babe? Exactly...
Doesnt it always go that advertisements carry some degree of falsity and the viewer must exercise his/her own good judgement ? If there is a similar ad on a television stating that if you sweat profusely after a small walk you could be suffering from high blood pressure, would it warrant a class action suit ?
Siggy Say, Siggy Do
phooey!
Just think, if I hadn't blocked images from all of doubleclick's servers, and disabled those popups... I might be in for some money! Curse you, Mozilla!
I don't have the background to comment on the legitimacy of this suit -- but I sure am curious to see how it plays out, since I have always hated the deceptiveness of those ads. My wife gets fooled occasionally, and I have to clean all that Gator crap off the computer *again*. If only she'd swear off IE for good....
There are only 10 types of people: those who understand decimal, those who don't, and, uh, 8 other types I forget.
I find this lawsuit a bit interesting, for where, except the internet, would we find this kind of advertisement. Consider a road sign telling you "Danger Road blocked" and an "alternative" rout that ends in Honest Harry's gas station. Sure, you might be able to tell that it was a fake sign, but is it legal because of that?
Anything that makes the Internet easier to use and less scary for the common user without limiting anybody else is a good thing.
Doubleclick is a scourge on humanity. Go get 'em! I just spent a good hour of my time removing various spyware from my girl's computer. There should be LAWs against advertising like crazy.
www.samuraidreams.com - My Blog
www.samuraifiles.com - Get Some Videos Here
to every new computer i log onto, i make sure the /etc/hosts or %windows%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts has the entry
:)
127.0.0.1 doubleclick.net
I added them and all their incantations to my ad-blocker in... what was it... 1997 ? :-) .htaccess file or a robots.txt on their server.
If I get a popup with a ?uid=x I like playing with the numbers to see if affiliate #666 or #31337 exist
Why stop there. Let's see if these pinheads have a
If it's banner shaped and it wobbles, pulsates or looks like an error message, I'm never going to see it again!
From the law firm's website:
WHO IS A MEMBER OF THE PROPOSED CLASS?
The class action Complaint was brought on behalf of all persons residing in the United States who have, while operating a computer, encountered an advertising banner like the one illustrated on this website.
If you saw the ads, you're a member of the class. You don't have to have clicked on any of them.
Remember the days when Republicans were the party of fiscal responsibility?
I was going to sign up for the class action lawsuit but I spent 2 hours going through OSDN sites and buying stuff from thinkgeek. I even think I somehow got signed up for a free trial of VS.net from microsoft.
Trixie slashdotisis
The ultimate network admin tool needs HELP!
DoubleClick's clients should really be upset. If you were paying DoubleClick to drive traffic to your site, wouldn't you want traffic that at least voluntarily sought information about what you provide rather than fools who clicked the "your system is not secure" pseudo dialog box?
Amazing magic tricks
On the other hand, if it takes an ambulance chasing laywer to stop these practices, that's not entirely bad. Except that they don't have the consumer's best interest in mind, they have their own best interest in mind.
Legislation through Litigation is the wrong answer. If they really did soemthing illegal or wrong, there are appropriate gov't agencies to deal with it.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Rather crude, but highly effective.
If you've ever been tricked by one of those ads telling you that your "connection is not optimized" or that you have "1 new message waiting," you are probably not reader of Slashdot!
And you see what was meant by the "tyranny of the majority".
On the other hand... Does anyone remember those Orkin commercials where it looks like a cockroach is crawling across your screen? Clever advertising, even if it is misleading. There was a lawsuit a while back by some idiot woman who threw her shoe at the TV when she saw the ad. If I remember correctly, she lost the lawsuit, as she should have.
True, it's a slightly different scenario for this DoubleClick lawsuit. The key difference is that in the cockroach commercial, it's /obviously/ a commercial. Not so for those damn DoubleClick ads, to the moderately-literate computer user.
IMHO, the best eventual outcome of this DoubleClick lawsuit would be some laws requiring Internet advertisers (operating in the U.S. of course, sigh) mark their ads as such, with a big red "ADVERTISEMENT" in the upper left corner. Sort of like newspaper ads.
That is such a bad example and it makes you look like such an idiot for bringing it up.
I have never heard from anybody I know (many are quite close to computer illiterate) who have clicked on these ads. I think it is hard to mistake them for error messages or anything else, but I do agree that even the attempt to decieve users is wrong.
Even if I had to only roll above a 1 on a sanity check to avoid clicking on it, I still had to roll that sanity check, and thus I was inconvenienced.
or use mozilla userContent.css to filter out the images
Oh, that's pretty damn cool. Here's an explanation so others won't have to do the googling again :) It apparently works in Opera, too.
That said, advertisers have never been allowed to make patently false claims. Just because these adds were on the internet, and not on TV, or radio, or in a magazine has no bearing on anything. Given the amount of latitude they have to stretch, bend, and massage the truth, it should be enough. Suing for outright lies seems pretty reasonable, and the couple cents per person they get in damages will make a nice symbolic warning.
..for Ad-filters.
Blocking *.doubleclick.com is very effective!
Maybe my memory is fuzzy, but doesn't the former head of PR or some similar position for DoubleClick now work under Ashcroft? Possible conflict of interest here or am I being too conspiritorial?
The US Constitution was crafted to protect citizens from the government as well as protect citizens from majority rule. Oh, and for 1 other reason; provide for the common defense. Everything else listed in it goes towards these 3 goals.
If she doesn't have written instructions on the exact steps to take to perform an operation on the computer, she can't do it. (After the first month of doing it regularly, she usually can do without the instructions. Until then, we have to walk her through it again and again.)
Things on the internet are even less clear to her. It took me an hour to convince her that it was okay for me to sign up for a free e-mail address, and that I would not be charged because Hotmail paid for itself by showing me banner ads. She's not stupid; she has a bachelor's degree in biology. (Her specialty was pond scum, which ought to make her understand the minds of the doubleclick advertisers perfectly, but I digress).
It's not a matter of intelligence. She just doesn't know computers.
I suspect many firewalls offer the same feature.
Shouldn't they be able to get in on the lawsuit? After all, if a user gets tricked by a FUI in a large company, it's usually IT that has to deal with it--that means added support costs.
Q: "Why do sound techs say 'check 1, 2'?"
A: "Cause if they could count any higher they'd be lighting techs."
...they'd detect the OS, and serve up an appropriately-themed banner ad.
So only stupid people get to be in this class?
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
From the Statement of Facts:
(emphasis mine)Ya gotta love a lawyer with the balls to characerize something as "diabolical;" not merely "greedy," "unethical," or even simply "fraudulent." They called this behavior worthy of the devil himself.
From Claims:
Hopefully this is a slam-dunk. The fact that they disguised their "puffery" such that people didn't realize they were ads gained them more clicks, but hopefully also a level of "reliance" beyond the low level that usually shields advertizing hyperbole from fraud claims.
Hopefully it won't stop here. The $505 per plaintif ($500 punative damages and an amusing $5 compensatory damages) has some teeth, but the most wronged parties aren't the ignorant clickers, but the ISPs who are paying to shuffle this crap back and forth. I keep wondering when the ISPs are going to sue spammers and junk ad pushers for some sort of trespass/DOS. Now they'd have a case for compensatory damages...
What I find to be a cleverer advertising method is to have your ads built into little games that pop up. I've been distracted by one in particular from IBM where you have to put different shapes into their respective slots before the timer runs out. Exactly like this kid's game that a childhood friend of mine (don't remember the name of it though). If some ad threw out a tetris game, it'd be all over for me.
Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes. -- Walt Whitman
The average user in this class will be lucky if they get 50 cents. The lawyers who filed it will probably net a few million. The only "user" (probably the lawyer's brother in law) who will get anything (perhaps few thousand bucks) is the guy with his name at the top of the complaint. At best, it's right-off for Double-Click, an annuity for a few lawyers (who will spend it on expensive trinkets), and a miniscule amount of job security for copier and paper mill workers. That's the way we keep cash sloshing around in our economy. It's what technologically advanced societies do to avoid boredom and the Third World has to look forward to. It's only a game.
Help, help!!! I'm being redressed!
Hah, I knew that it had to be a fake! I've always wondered "when did I install a Microsoft Windows skin in my KDE?".
Support bacteria, it's the only culture some people have
Hold on. Your early post claimed "all advertising is fraudulent". Now you claim honest ads are "practically nonexistant", ie some exist. Make your mind up! Or perhaps all your first posts are inaccurate...
When I'm that old, I'll probably do the same.
DoubleClick's entire business model is based on gross invasion of what little privacy we have left, intensive data mining, consumer profiling, spamming, etc., ad nauseum. Far as I'm concerned, they deserve this!
Some examples: In 1998, the spammed Princeton U, trolling for job candidates. In June of 2003, DoubleClick announced their own so-called anti-spam initiatives that, according to the article, will "focus on finding out how consumers identify spam, to give marketers a better idea of how they can avoid being unfairly singled out as spammers." (For the record, spam is any E-mail received that tries to sell you something or, in the case of political spam, get your vote, and that you did not ask for).
Want more? No problem. In 2001, DoubleClick two unnamed E-mail marketing companies to, according to a quote in the article from CBS's Market Watch, "increase its junk e-mail capabilities."
Still not convinced? How about this thread over at the Firewall-Wizards site from 1999?
In summary, it looks like DoubleClick has long attempted to redefine spam as "That Which We Do Not Do." It also appears that their ethics are questionable at best, especially in light of those FUI banners on web pages.
DoubleClick, if you're reading this... You brought it on yourselves, and you have nothing but your own shady practices to blame. May you go down in a nice, pretty set of multicolored flames, and may the ashes be used as space filler for the next five Great Deconstructed Architectural Makeovers in FunFun Town. Nick Danger could probably use a new office...
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
I thought plaintiff has to prove a harm with money value. What is that for clicking a diversion site? Different if the diversion instantly installs nasty-ware without further confirmation, but I don't think that's the case.
Shitty
User
Interface
But seriously, this ranks right up there with suing for being burnt by hot coffee that is hot everytime you get it but because you didn't see a warning label you get paid big bux for your ignorance. Anyway the class can be sued by a class action lawsuit for defacing the good image of internet users with at least a double digit IQ?Oh, that's pretty damn cool. Here's an explanation so others won't have to do the googling again :) It apparently works in Opera, too.
What you linked to is an explanation of how to use css to block ads, what the parent linked to is how to block ads using the hosts file.
'Tis true, a tool which can elimate virtually all ads, no matter what browser you're using! {Insert cheap heavenly jingle} The Proxomitron! http://www.google.com/search?q=proxomitron I'm suprised no one else mentioned this one yet...
ads don't work when your on a Mac or Linux.
Another reason to switch to Windows!
Then again if you use a Mac and join the class, then you really are stupid.
Which is good.
When they lose they won't be able to aford any more damn ads period.
I find blank spots in web pages preferable to deceptive ads. Given the sheer volume of garbage progagated by a small number of sources, entries like the following in you hosts file are surprisingly effective: 127.0.0.1 doubleclick.net 127.0.0.1 ad.doubleclick.net 127.0.0.1 ln.doubleclick.net 127.0.0.1 m.doubleclick.net 127.0.0.1 ad.ca.doubleclick.net 127.0.0.1 ad.de.doubleclick.net 127.0.0.1 ad.es.doubleclick.net 127.0.0.1 ad.fr.doubleclick.net 127.0.0.1 ad.it.doubleclick.net 127.0.0.1 ad.jp.doubleclick.net 127.0.0.1 ad.kr.doubleclick.net 127.0.0.1 ad.nl.doubleclick.net 127.0.0.1 ad.no.doubleclick.net 127.0.0.1 ad.se.doubleclick.net 127.0.0.1 ad.uk.doubleclick.net
n/t
Has anyone else noticed the deceptive advertising that AOL and Juno have been using in their latest marketing campaigns?
AOL: "Sign up now and experience the REAL internet"
This is targeted towards people who are not computer/internet savy. Aol is trying to fool the uneducated users into thinking that there is more than one internet, and by signing up with them you get the real deal.
Juno: "Don't you wish you your ISP would let you visit any site you wanted to?"
This is targeted towards people who again are not computer/internet savy and will think that they have to pay extra to visit websites.
Why are they allowed to intentionally mislead people like this?
... is going to be finding enough people who are willing to testify that they were stupid enough to click on the silly ads.
Then you could just block all traffic from sites like double click, and gator, or who ever.
Mozilla is the better browser of course but at least with aproxy you could create a sort of safty net to weed out the worst offenders. And you users could use which ever web enabled software they wanted.
Quite simply, they put small Windows-like -[]X sets in the corner, and if you click on them, it takes you to their ad. They also put a "close" button there. Click unthinkingly (oh, yeah, another popup. Let me close it... whoops), and you get diverted to their adspace.
So yeah, I've been tricked.
But that said, I cannot see this lawsuit as a good thing. They're bad. They're evil, though not extremely so. But yeah, they're evil. But does that justify even more evil [which lawsuits, being an economic type of warfare really are]?
This is kindof how I view the US Government vs. Al Quaida. Should I really be rooting for one side or the other? Both have regularly demonstrated that they are evil. Heaven forbid! I'd rather root for both to survive another day, and learn to be good instead, even if there was only a slim chance of that happening.
In the same way, I can't root for DoubleClick or the ClassActionLawsuit. I'd rather that both sides just learned how to behave.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
How did I know someone would comment on the McDonald's coffe case?
Check this out: The woman was served 200F coffee, and the putz at the window dumped it on her lap. She suffered 3rd degree burns on her thighs, stomach, and groin area, and had to have her son quit his job to help take care of her. They weren't looking for cash either, just help with the medical bills. The amount they sued for was less than McDonald's makes on coffee alone in a 48 hour period.
PS - The twinkie defense is a BS story too.
They're not gonna "loose" you idiot, they're gonna "lose." Cripes, you're the 3rd person to make this mistake, and you did it twice! Was it strange double-typo, some really clever play on words, or did you skip 5th grade English class?
If you've ever been tricked by one of those ads telling you that your "connection is not optimized" or that you have "1 new message waiting," you could be part of the class.
Yeah, the special education class.
Links mangled because we already get the idea.
~~~
While coffee may be served hot, most outlets choose not to serve it at lava temperatures. And then of course, others, like McD, calculate exactly how much they can profit from deliberately maiming their customers for life, then go merrily ahead and do it.
sigs are hazardous to your health
I have been wondering for some time whether people would be willing to pay for an Internet service with an aggressive anti-spam and advert-blocking policy.
I know some people know how to accomplish this for free, and best of luck to them. What I'm wondering is, are consumers ready to pay for the convenience of having this set up for them?
Maybe there is a market for a local ISP with value-added features like parental control, advert-blocking and a human being at the end of a phone line. {Sort of like what AOL would have us believe them to be, but for real}.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Is it fraud if the fraud requires you to be a pinhead to fall for it?
But I guess that's not what this is about. There are plenty of people who have intelligence enough to justify their oxygen consumption who know little enough about computers to not recognize, for instance, that the "window" they're clicking on is embedded within another window, or that it is windows-style and they're using a mac.
I suppose it's really no different than a dishonest auto mechanic relying on the ignorance of drivers to to defraud them.
There seems to be a new breed of "popups" that are actually just flash animations that come up on the screen over whatever you're reading. A lot of the more respectable companies doing this usually have a pixel-wide "Close" button to stop it, but some come to the middle of the page and WILL NOT GO AWAY. They're designed to look like a "FUI" with the windows buttons and all, but since it's a flash ad, even clicking the 'x' or 'close window' that they usually put up there will bring up the website. The only way out of it is to just forget about the site or reload and hope it doesn't get generated again. Or turn off flash :) A lot of people don't or won't know how to, though.
No matter what they do, DoubleClick will always, repeatedly, be able to claim a mistrial for conflict of interest. After all, where in the US are you going to find a Judge that doesn't hate banner ads? (Then again, maybe that's why they filed it in PA...)
If you've ever been tricked by one of those ads telling you that your "connection is not optimized" or that you have "1 new message waiting," you could be part of the class.
/. ? Get yourself back to AOL and stop getting big ideas.
If you've ever been tricked by one of _those_ ads then what are you doing reading
Greetings,
My name's ##########. I do a bit of donation tech work for the local church, friends, family, and have fun tinkering with computers (Linux and Windows) in general. I consider myself quite fluent in technological matters.
I've been on the net' since 1994. Then the web was clean and straight forward. It was '98 when the ads came about as an idea of making money, an idea that I like since it could support websites. Then, nasty ads that use hacks in Internet Explorer started coming out of places like DoubleClick and "partners" that would do a multitude of things.
Some DC (doubleclick) ads would go FullScreen and you would be forced to click on the ad to make it dissappear. The only way around that was + to switch out of Internet Explorer. I've seen the ads for these places be anywaere from Spyware to XXX dialers that encouraged and/or lied to you do get you to use. One person I know was hit by the xxx dialer, but didnt have a modem in that machine.
Other DC ads would actually use the hacks to illegitimately put files on my hard drive (not talking about web cache). One put files into c:/wow/ . I never did use the files, and they re-appeared after certain ads that DC sponsored. It seems that DC never checked for legitimate ads. I consider hacking a web browser like this to be illegal entry, but I have no way of "proving this". It could be an 'accident', but I doubt it.
The most recent ads that DC sponsored totally mislead many people I help, along with doing things to my other computers. Like I said earlier, I use Linux. I've seen recent DB ads that totally lock up Mozilla (a free web browser for Windows, Linux, Mac...) and Konqueror, the embedded Web browser for KDE desktop for Linux. Other common ads are for Gator, Wetherbug, and other assortement of SPYware that tracks, reports, and popups ads on your desktop EVEN WHEN YOU'RE NOT SURFING THE WEB. And when one of these spyware pieces of garbage get in your system, it hooks to many places so that you cant uninstall it.
Bandwidth cost for dealing with these ads along with time lost attemping to remove spyware associated (wth 1 windows reinstall) would at least be 700$.
If anything, I'm not anti-advertisement. I'm against misleading ads, system crippling ads, and other hard-to-get-rid-of problems that these ads and the adware they shove on you. If you could, please contact me back for information about this suit.
Graciously,
##############
(address block)
As a disclaimer about this email, I hereby enter this email into PUBLIC DOMAIN. I allow this to be entered into evidence to court either as partial or whole contents.
That's kind of a stretch. Well maybe they harp against advertising to prove their own "intelligence". Yes, you aren't affected by ads, you're smart, now shut up and move along.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
wow... that google link shows some lame ass sci-fi conventions. I guess any woman who shows up at
one of those is automatically a "babe".
was one that looked just like an AOL instant messenger window. It was an animated gif and the "content" of the ad was delivered as messages being sent to me.
Being signed on and talking to a few people at the time, it almost had me.
Oh, and other things that suck:
flash ads that float around the page
ads that make noise
windows that turn off the windowing frame (no close button, etc).
windows that appear off screen
no comment
Precedent may have already lost them their case:
? tid=123&tid=99
:).
http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/03/05/28/173228.shtml
Will they, as opposed to the purple monkey people, have to pay damages though? One could argue that knowing the outcome of the above case meant they KNEW that what they were doing was illegal.
Either way I dont care, doubleclick is dev/nulled out in my hosts file
Love the new acronym. hehe
Supermarket newspaper stuffers like the RiteAid ones are often just lists of products and prices. That's it. No claims of being cheapest, nor claims that the products are the best.
The new car ads are typically quite different, along the lines you mention.
Moreover, the GUI elements of KDE are unlike those of Windows, which is what they usually in those FUI advertisements, and I could easily tell which ones are real and which ones are fake (belive it or not, there are some real GUI element banners where you can select some things, and THEN click on it to take you to the results.)
These people ought to sue themselves for being such complete boobs.
nuff said
The programmers at DoubleClick are coding wizards...they must have spent months getting Windows APIs to work on my Mac. I don't even need to have Virtual PC running to access these important system messages...
Those are all imitations of Monopolo$oft messages, so those who do not submit themselves to Windows are not affected. Now it is a well-known fact that Windows users receive a continuous and annoying amount of system messages. So what could be more natural for someone stupid enough to use Windows than to click on the fake message? After all, they pollute the internet with those irresistable clicks on "WouldYouLikeToHaveAfivePoundPenis" ads, don't they?
WHy do they sue doubleclick? When benneton had an 'inappropriate' billboard at some time benneton had to fix it, not the ad agency nor the billboard owner... crazy stuff..
Of those to whom much is given, much is required.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Under claims: 51. Defendants unreasonably interfered with Class members' use and enjoyment of their property through a pattern and practice of deceptive advertising banners that caused Class members to unknowing divert their time, attention, work, and computer hardware to the purpose of broadcasting defendants' website.
If the suit goes through, this could be great for the anti-spam movement (for lack of a better term). Just replace "banners" with "emails". A great deal of the spam I get has deceptive subject lines, such as "I've missed you" "We need to talk", or even "I'm suing you". It wouldn't stop all spam, but it would at least reduce the amount of spam that's harder to filter...
Except that they're not!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
and I did it thousands of times, just waiting for this type of action...Gator next, followed by Xupiter. I smell retirement!
Of course, you could take the word "class" a step further and suggest that (1) such people need to take a class or two on how the Internet works or (2) such people should not take such classes because they are a waste of time and don't teach you how the Internet really works.
They made things that looked like windows diaglog boxes including [x] to close them that were all part of the picture so if you clicked on the internal x it would jump to the site. The internet is just like a giant bazaar for snake oil salesmen.
This lawsuit seems rather frightening to me, if these guys win and this is declared to be fraudulent practice, then this could have huge implications for programing. I would hate to have to have to reference a chart and make sure that any GUIs I built did not resemble any of the system boxes from every operateing system out there. Notice that, the add that they display as an example looks like a windows box. Did the original programers intend to market to a mac audience and not even bother to make sure that their banners did not look like a windows system message? Prehaps they were marketing to a linux useing audience. And when you click the add you do get a message. I would say that any advertisement would be clasified as a message. Also I am sure that some system did help in the creation of that message, so how on earth would that window be missrepresenting themselves any one. I guess that people can be fooled by any thing. Oh and on a last not any one who wants to buy the full quit claim deed to our nations capatiol can call me, its a wonderfull piece of property. Lets grow up and not blame everyone for the ignorance of a few.
Faith_Healer -- The antethsis to almost everything, and the worlds worst speller.
False advertizing is illegal it's against the damn law and that is a government regulation. In any event, the law that says you can't post fake highway signs dosn't say you can't do it because only highway signs can be put up by the government, it just says you can't do it.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
what are you talking about? those ads don't look anything like aqua.
You can get money even if you never clicked any of the ads. But why let facts get in the way of pure, unadulterated idiocy?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
You _do_ realize that naming yourself as a plaintiff in this suit basically amounts to admitting incompetence, right? It's not *that* hard to remember the difference between a system message and a popup ad. Windows puts enough system messages out that every loyal user ought to tell the difference by now.
Error = no new window
Popup ad = new browser window
Any questions?
Do we really need to dumb the computing world down one more level just because a few ignorant individuals had failed to understand their own computers and thus chose litigation over education?
Don't get me wrong, social safety nets can be a helpful thing sometimes. Lately, however, it seems we're taking it a bit too far.
It seems to me that the success of this suit hinges on who created the ads. Doubleclick serves these ads, sure. But shouldn't the defendant(s) be the company(ies) whose ads these are? The complaint does claim that DC did create (not just serve) these ads, but is this correct?
From the complaint:
"19. In a diabolical scheme to deceive computer users into misdirecting their computers to Internet sites of defendant's clients, thus disrupting the work the user was otherwise performing, defendants devised and disseminated deceptive advertising banners that gave the appearance of being system warnings or computer alerts being issued by the user's own computer, and enticing the computer user to appropriately respond to the imposter alert or warning."
"...devised and disseminated..." If DC did create the ads, then, yay--go to it Fer-man. Otherwise, I think he's trying to get his hand in the wrong pair of pants.
--an aside: "a diabolical scheme"? Dr. Evil is CEO of doubleclick?
Yeah and can you sue orkin for throwing a shoe at your tv because their 'commercial' has a roach climbing across it that makes it look like its on your tv?
This lawsuit is stupid.
You know, I have a couple million bucks stuck in a nigerian bank account, if you could just give me your SSN, date of birth, bank account number and routing number, I could transfer the cash to your account and we could split the money!
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Sorry but not everybody has expertise in computer. Especially I see my parents are the type of person clicking on it ("but, son, this is a windows message ! You gotta click on it !").
This has nothing to do with intelligence, but rather with scamming less knowledgeable people into doing something they would not do on their own. If this would have been an advertising for a software "X" people would not sue because they would not clik on it by error.
If you fail to see this point, man I advise you to take some step back, breath slowly, and think this twice "Is everybody as knowledgeable as me in Computer ? Am I as knowledgable in those other people area of expertise (sale, Medicine, biology, Math, Law, Cooking whatever) as to mock them with my superior intellect ?". If the answer is twice yes. Well congrat. You must be God and freaking Omniscient... In all other case you have no right to mock those people because they choosed another area of expertise.
Bottom line ifDoubleclick was not scamming and faking windows UI, those problem would not exist.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
I fell for it again! And it was the ad in the press release PDF! And I'm on Gentoo GNU/Linux! They're good!
Half of the post here show a disgusting elistim. No wonder people look down at us geek when you pull a "you are stupid to click on such message" on such things. For pity's sake do you all realise that not everybody is knowledgeable in computer or technology in general ? All those poeple ever wanted was using email and browse a bit, not to be misleaded by a scamming company or being looked down and alughed at by us geek....
I think it is time for me to go away until this topic go in archive because I feel like seething and exploding at the insenssibility of people. Mod me as a troll. Go on. Or flamming.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Maybe you should read the post in between. And look at the authors of the posts you comment on.
You can be part of the the Class action if you are willing to admit that you are stupid.
I permenantly lose 0.68 seconds reading these messages.
... but that had to have been an animal attack or alien abduction/anal probing....
GOATSE.CX
Actually, no. I've had doubleclick and many varants of them in my host files for years. I've still seen these false error messages. And lately I've seen my computer installing "something" when I reboot, even though I know I haven't installed anything! The truth is that scum like doubleclick know about host files and are constantly adding new domains and changing ip addresses to keep them from being blocked on your system. You can only play catch-up, but you can't keep them out this way. It's far from an ultimate answer, or effective.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
The ones that start out with a ring that sounds
deceptively similar (if not exactly) like the popular cell phone rings out there? It confuses the heck out of me and anyone sitting with me. I wish they'd go after them too.
Yes...and we all know that doubleclick will pay up if they lose...we all know efax sure paid up when they lost...ummm....NOT!!!
... like this is that members of the class - the aggrieved and annoyed computer users who saw these messages - might receive something like a coupon good for 20 cents off at one of the DoubleClick sponsors if the suit is successful. The lawyers, on the other hand, will reap millions of dollars in fees. IOW, it's only the lawyers who win here...
Take my mother for instance. She is new to computers. When the windows GUI . . .
. . . and this is how you repay her? As I pointed out in comments on this previous /. article, you really have no right to complain if you go with the monopoly solution and then get screwed in the end. If you really cared about your mom, you would have gotten her a Mac. Nice GUI for her, nice Unix for you, and no confusion for the ads that are made for the Windows morons.
I am sure these faked system messages only bring a knowing chuckle from those that "Think Different" or run with the Penguin set. Faked DOS, Windows 95, 98, and XP alerts don't catch the eye of this long-time Mac user. I will admit, however, that the ones that have the animated mouse pointer moving to the "Click Here" button are a bit disconcerting. My favorite one has the faked system analysis that claims to have detected Windows on my G4.
Although I abhor lawyers and would usually tell victims of Windows-centric pop-ups to "get a Mac," I do think such faked messages should be illegal. A system message is implicitly "from your computer" while an pop-up message is "from the advertiser." If advertisers can fake a message from your computer, why couldn't a telemarketer fake a voicemail from your wife? Impersonating a trusted part of a customer's life should not be permitted.
Of course, the stickiest cases occur in the new printer ink replenishment systems that take your browser to the manufacturer's online ink ordering site when the printer detects that it is getting low on ink. Is this a message from your hardware or a message from a for-profit commercial party?
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Install "Proxomitron" to block this stuff, and install "Ad-aware" to clean it off your system.
Computer illeterate?!?!
BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA ! ! !
Have them drop me a line if you need a reference.
You spelled litigious incorrectly as well.
Ponce.
- learn to swim.
I ate three boxes of thin-mints and didn't lose a pound. And to make matters worse, they weren't even made out of girl scouts.
Fight Spammers!
And murder is a poor method of conflict resolution, and Bill Gates could have made a respectable amount of money honestly, and lots of people who do crappy things have the talent and drive to do things better. When they do crappy things, punishment is what they deserve. Double click made money lying to people about their computers, they deserve to lose that money and then some.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I use squid as a transparent proxy on my firewall, which lets me manage the hosts file on one machine for all internal clients. All the marketing sleeze is localhost'ed and I use Bannerblind in Mozilla to remove the dead space from the page layout. It saves me bandwidth and desktop real estate.
Most banner ads don't really bother me though, unless they're animated and blink nasty school girl colors in my face while I'm trying to read something. Mozilla is good for this too, since it can disable animated gifs, or only allow them to run once.
Brian
how can you sue a mouse action :-)
in my life God comes first.... but Linux is pretty high after that
Francis Smit
is fraudulent is the broadcasting an internet IP address one. That one is obviously designed to frighten people who are not very knowledgable about the internet. The others don't have that scare factor. Plus most people except people very new to computers would recognize them as false.
read my blog
musings on politics and technol
Is DoubleClick also behind FUI advertisements that shake? I'm curious what the shaking is for. Is the advertiser trying to draw your eyes to the ad, or is the advertiser trying to make it so reasonably obvious that the message is a fake as to avoid litigation by pinheads who still get fooled by these things.
The reason McDonalds served its coffee hot enough to scald is simple: It allowed them to use lower quality beans, without people noticing. In short, they were able to profit by making their products more dangerous for customers.
You may as well say that we can't protect people from being duped by Ponzi schemes, so why not make them legal? The fact is, these are false advertisements, designed to convince the recipient that there is something wrong with his or her computer. This should be outlawed, and I'm hard pressed to see how such a rule violates anyone's freedom of speech.
Is California really stupid? Or just avidly pro-consumer?
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Mod the post up for +5 funny. It just takes a little bit of thinking to get the joke.
The FTC is an independent federal agency. The President or any of his henchmen trying to mess with is is illegal. Bad bad bad.
paintball
dave
If you believe that, then you probably also
believe the CIA provides completely
unbiases intelligence.
I have recently been helping windows using friends realise whats going on inside their PCs by installing Ad-Aware for them and Mozilla (with the 'ask before setting cookie' box checked). They are pretty amazed at all the marketing crap going on in there. Especially all the third party cookies that some sites try to set. Soon changes their opinion about some websites that they frequent. Hats off to Mozilla!
while sco {
wget -O
}
Just food for thought -- is this really just the online version of "Special Advertising Sections" in magazines and newspapers (advertisements that look like real magazine articles except for a tiny disclaimer)?
These ads are more potent becaues there is no disclaimer (though some sites do point out which areas are for advertising) and seems to be tailored to the user ("*your* computer is messed up!")
Has there ever be a similar suit against a magazine or newspaper?
Also, is there precedent that would indicate that the advertiser (company that made the misleading ad) or the publisher (company running the ad) is responsible? Because here they are going after the latter only, which seems a little odd. Heh, maybe DoubleClick just looks like an easier target than these tiny, shifty advertisers.
I live in Pittsburgh, which resides in Allegheny county in Pennsylvania. Sad fact is that I hear most of the interesting technical news from the area on Slashdot instead of reading it in the paper or news channel.
Wait nevermind, I never read the newspaper or watch the news channel. I have a high standard for news and somehow Slashdot makes it and the other local sources don't...
If what you are reading sounds funny, or sarcastic, lame, or stupid
it is because it is supposed to be. just laugh
This may be a little off topic, but I've seen several ( Probably just one, my mind tends to blow things out of proportion ) posts about stupidity in which readers who were fooled were advised to 'go back to AOL' or something similar.
Jesus, Mary and Joseph, people, can't you get a life?
Have we devolved in this society to the point where anyone not on 'our' level of 'intelligence,' someone not as 'inately familiar' with technologies which we use everyday ( Most likely many, many times a day ) is an idiot?
I'd like to see one of our highly evolved brains who thinks that my 72 year old Grandmother and my mother, who has a Masters in Socialwork and does Assessments in a Mental Facility, are idiots wash and dry their clothes without the aid of modern machines to do it, or correctly and quickly diagnose and assess what treatment is needed for someone who is brought into a hospital with burns all over their arms and only talks in the third person.
Oh, and for those people who like taking Pot Shots at AOL users ( And often call them *cough* lusers ) I would say this:
I use AOL. I've been using it for atleast 5 years now, my memory is rather bad, but that's the fault of the swiss cheese I have for a brain. I'm now 17, nearly 18. I use AOL to Chat and Communicate with my friends, send and recieve a majority of my e-mail, and to get non-vital news
( SARS spreading to a neighborhood near me, what President Bush is doing -- anything that most likely wouldn't make
I use AOL because most of my friends have neither the Will, nor Want, to use IRC, either because they don't like it's lack of features ( Not that it doesn't do what it was designed to do, and very, very well ) or because they just prefer AOL because they've grown up using it, or it was the first such program they've used.
I could have stopped using AOL several years ago when my family got a Cable Modem, but I kept it for my E-Mail account, and to keep in contact with friends, and because I roleplay online when it's not feasible to get the entire DnD group up at 3am, or the Vampire Troupe, or my best buds aren't available for a game of Magic. I can easily and quickly find people who would like to play a game of Dungeons and Dragons, 1st, 2nd or 3rd edition, or anything else, for that matter, in real time, quickly and efficiently.
While it's most likely, more than like, definately possible, to do the same thing with a search engine or a certain web page, I doubt it's as quick or easy as using AOL or some other similar ISP.
I would ask that people think twice before calling someone an idiot because they have a different way of doing things that isn't your way, or the fast way, or the most efficient way. This country was founded on many things, one of them was freedom of... CHOICE.
Yes, the same choice many of you and I use to install something other than Microsoft Windows upon our computers, or to decide that, 'Yes, I like evolution -- and give it two opposable thumbs up!' or, 'No, I don't feel like worshiping your god, thank you,' is the same choice some people exercise to use AOL. While you may not _AGREE_ with that choice, you should atleast respect it.
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
...would that have possibly been a Hong Kong FUI?
*rimshot*
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
Just last week I spent a week's vacation in San Diego, using my compuserve account (otherwise unused except for email) to access the Grand Internet. Interestingly enough, the only pop-up ad I received all week through CIS was an ad that said something to the effect of "click through to here to buy a product to prevent you from getting these pop-up ads again". It's a pop-up ad advertising a product that would prevent a specific pop-up ad from popping up. AOL users are getting the same pop-up ad. It seems to me (and I am a lawyer) that this is little more than extortion. It's a message that says nothing other than "pay me money, and I'll stop bothering you". I'm not a class action attorney (I do trusts and estates work), but it seems to me that this kind of advertisement is actionable, because it's not really advertising a product - it's not much more than "protection".
Not only that, but I also noticed that while using CIS software to access the Internet, Real Player added a framed advertisement to my IE windows requesting that I visit their website and pay them for an upgrade (before you knock IE, remember that most Windows users use IE and Real may just as easily be able to effect other browers - I wouldn't know, I'm not a programmer). I'm not sure this is actionable, as Real One gets installed when the Compuserve software is installed, but it is annoying as all hell, and I don't like it, and I'll be damned if I ever give them any money. Anyone out there running AOL or CIS should check out their IE brower as well. The software adds a real player icon to the IE toolbar.
144l. ph34r my 133t l3g4l 5k1lz!
People who actually believe those are error messages are StupidPeople (tm). Like, you can't tell that it's part of a web page, stupid.
Just a little side note: It reminds me of all these stupid people on my cousin's street. I came to L.A. for a week (I live in Mexico City, if you must know) to visit my cousin and his buddies, and to go booze it up on the Sunset strip. So there's this stupid restaurant on the corner of his street, another one of those "trendy" restaurants with one-syllable names (because StupidPeople cannot remember names with more than one syllable--it overflows their stack), and it's always crowded. The StupidPeople who eat there always park their cars on my cousin's street, and as a result, my cousin and all his neighbors are at a loss to find parking spaces. During the weekend, it's especially bad. To make matters ironic, his street is permit-parking only. So he called the parking enforcement agency and they came by and ticketed at least 10 different cars. All these StupidPeople came back to their cars, saw the tickets, and started reading the parking signs, as if they didn't know that it's illegal to park there without a permit. What's even funnier? My cousin's roommate was outside when one such group of StupidPeople pulled up in their Stupid Ugly Vehicle (SUV) and he told them that they can't park there. They did anyway, got a ticket, and then acted all surprised when they did (I watched them gleefully from the window when they returned to their car).
I call them StupidPeople because they all look the same. They all have this Los Angeles accent and vocabulary that is different than in, say, Louisville. All the women have stupid, meaningless tattoos on their lower backs. All the men have a lame haircut. And you can tell by their speech that unlike the typical computer geek, they do not have a brain inside their head. They are simply StupidPeople. Their stupidity drives me up the wall.
Back to banner ads: People who fell for this trick should not be allowed to use a computer in the first place. And the people who made these stupid ads should be shot for lack of imagination.
In my browser(phoenix) ads.doubleclick.net and .doubleclick.net are on the top of the blocked list for cookies and java scripts execution. I didn't like them and hence they were not welcome. Anyway these ads were distinctly identifiable in my browser as the window proclaiming that my Internet connection was not optimized, did not look like a Windomaker window which I use on my desktop. Also since I use Linux, I know the operating system or the desktop software is not thinking that I am a stupid user and hence providing these extra optimization helps. I think majority of Linux or *BSD users might not have been tricked by these smart ass marketeers because of the shape of actual dialog boxes on their desktops. Ah but they were not the original targets either. sigh...
By the way, one of the major reason why I stopped using Netscape 4.7 (on linux) was its inability to block java script pop ups selectively. I can now surf better with my new mozilla firebird (phoenix) browser.
Well, I guess someone had to think of going on and sueing DoubleClick, but I say: lets go on. Lets sue companies like eBay that have their banners all over the net for: "Disruption of purchased service from a 3rd party", or better yet, why not we go about and sue Casino On-Net (888.com) for having their cookies and banners all over the place for the same reason. If the users of computers see a message and can't tell that it's a fake one, then I say: "Let them go to that site".
I must admit that most people aren't computer aware to such an extent, but comm'on, lets be reasonable. Advertisement companies will do anything to catch the eye of a potential customer, and the includes putting wrongfull teasers, mis-leading leads and some times, down right double-meaning ads. If a campgain includes a mis-leading teaser, which then shows you the real thing, it just proves that it did it's job RIGHT !!!
Now, I do admit that DoubleClick had surpassed in the mis-leading campgain issue, and that their tactics are questionable. But if you would see such a campgain on a bill board, you will think nothing of it.
This reminds me of a campgain I saw in the UK a while back, for Burger-King. Where they had this hill-billy sitting in a car, and mumbling something that no one understood. And you had to sit tight, watch till the end, and see that it's an ad for Burger-King.
I think that the law suit should be changed from mis-leadin information, to a breach of contract. The reason is that DoubleClick's contract states that a site will not be permitted to create a mis-leading banner, nor advertise something which is not rightfully theirs. So, DoubleClick is in breach of their own User-Agreement, and that is a breach of ethics. This should be the thing that needs to pointed out, not just say: "You posted misleading banners, and created FUI interface".
L.S
L.S.
i don't know what's worse.
banners, spammers or lawyers.
Privacy is terrorism.
So, by just looking at the ad, your intitled to the lawsuit, so.. in essence, by looking up the lawsuit on the site, and them showing you the ad, poof, you're in.. wow, that was easy to do....
Somebody has discovered something evil enough to combat the spammers. Lets just hope that the lawyers dont take over and start running the world. Wait, they already do. Damn.
I'm not sure why DoubleClick is being pursued here. They are accused of participating in a 'diabolical' scheme to hoodwink the unwary, the evidence cited being their claim that their software can match appropriate ads to particular user types. DoubleClick's claims are actually a bit vague. In my experience, they have difficulty narrowing things down to a specific continent. They can, however, limit the number of times an ad is sent to a specific IP address, and 'rotate' a bunch of ads so that they're shown preferentially, according to which get the best click-through rates. However, DoubleClick rarely see any of the ads that go through their system, especially now they seem to have outsourced their ad-trafficking units to other firms, and certainly don't censor them (that's left to the publishers). DART (their trafficking system) allows both advertisers and publishers to set up ad campaigns themselves - often only the advertiser (or their agent) and the publisher (or their network) will ever see an ad before it's published. And because everythings 'dynamic', advertisers can change ads after publishers have 'approved' them (though the latest version of DART does allow publishers to prevent this). I think this is a bit like if I sued my ISP for forwarding all the spam I get. Which might be worth bearing in mind if this class action succeeds.
This entire thread is an advertisement for ferencelaw.com. I'm not a fan of doubleclick due to their privacy practices, but their popups come when you visit a webpage that chose to show them, not because they hacked into your computer. This is just another frivolous lawsuit because some lawyer doesn't have enough to do.
I find it sad that thinly veiled advertising gets passed on as news on Slashdot. While I am as annoyed at DoubleClick's tricks as the next person, I am more disturbed by the fact that apparently any lawyer can concoct a technology-related class-action lawsuit and then get free publicity by writing in to Slashdot about it.
I tend to agree with most of the threads that there are some incredibly annoying ads out there. Many of which use tactics of trickery and annoyance to get clicks. However, I must bring this thread back to the original post, and ask what DoubleClick has to do with this. I quote from the original post "DoubleClick is a leading provider of products and services used by direct marketers, web publishers and advertisers to plan, execute and analyze marketing programs." So if I am not mistaken, DoubleClick is not making these ads that you are all complaining about. They are just providing the products and services to clients who are making the ads. I would equate this with a lawsuit against Macromedia for a flash movie on some lowly site that people found to be offensive. Am I wrong on this?
No matter what medium is used to deliver the fraudulent message.
The internet advertising business today is similar to radio and television advertising in their early beginnings. The fact that law makers are now realizing that there is no really new aspect to business on the web... including taxes, business rules as well as advertising rules will change on the internet to protect all users
Smart or dumb, inexperienced or experienced users alike!
i am not tech savvy (psychologist by trade, and we are a notoriously anachronistic lot) but i have to say, i have never been fooled by one of these ads. if one gets sucked in by an ad of this sort, i almost think that it is sort of a good "net-learning experience."
Well, as far as Sig's go, Freud was a doozy.
And how many support folks among us have had to take time to educate our people (no, I didn't do anything to your computer, it's just an ad, relax already!). Multiply your hours by number of support techs in the world. Multiply by average wage plus 15% taxes and overhead.
I don't believe individuals should be the plaintiffs in this suit, as at least they learned something valuable -- to research before you click. Businesses were the real victim here.
btw, I wasted 15 minutes of my time posting this. good thing I'm on salary -- JC
Ok, after reading some of the threads here, I was obliged to throw in my .02 euros
Don't forget that the purpose of class action suits is NOT to enrich the victims, rather, it is to send a message to the company perpetrating the malaise. Just like the famous McDonalds case. People freaked out because the woman won $10mil or so -- but they forget that the $10mil was not to ease her suffering, rather, it was to punish McDonalds. We could argue about whether or not that's punishment or not but the fact still remains....those large jury awards you keep seeing are mostly to punish the perps, not to amend the victims.
I don't make the rules. I just tell it like it is.
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/484 4089.htm