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Judge OKs Competitive Pop-Up Ads
Mirkon writes "A while back, U-Haul filed suit against adware giant WhenU for displaying competing advertisements to users as they browsed U-Haul's site. Friday, District Judge Gerald Bruce Lee's ruling dismissed U-Haul's suit, saying '...the fact is that the computer user consented to this detour when the user downloaded WhenU's computer software from the Internet,' and 'Alas, we computer users must endure pop-up advertising along with her ugly brother, unsolicited bulk e-mail, "spam," as a burden of using the Internet.' While the ruling was issued in the context of unfair competitive marketing, it's speculated that this will have broad implications in the fight against adware - and they aren't kind to the user. WhenU chief executive Avi Naider is unfortunately quoted as saying 'This is a victory for consumer choice -- it ultimately protects consumers' right to control what they see on their computer screens.'"
When judges make their rulings, they have two things to go by. First, they look at the letter of the law. If the law is clear on a specific point, the Judge will usually rule along those lines.
Oftentimes, the law isn't sufficiently clear about something. So judges generally look for past rulings made on related issues. They then make their ruling based on the precedents that other judges have laid down in the past. Today's ruling on pop-ups is a terribly bad thing, because other judges are likely to use it to decide future pop-up cases.
Of course, as other posters have pointed out, there are tools that users can employ to block all pop-ups. The Mozilla browser can solve this problem once and for all.
I guess the question is, how long most users remain clueless about pop-ups and spam, and ignorant about how to block these intrusions. Right now, it's mainly the tech-savvy population that knows how to do this. But I bet in five years' time, all dominant web and email clients will automatically block pop-ups and spam. With any luck, that will render stupid precedents like today's meaningless, and will send wretched companies like WhenU where they belong.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
I do use Mozilla, however I don't know of any adware that runs on Linux.
Opera
That is a another reason NOT to BUY LOGITEC hardware. I remember calling them about getting win32 drivers for a scanner I bought because they only provided dos drivers, they wanted to charge me 80.00 for the disk, that was 20.00 more than the scanner!!! well I just wnet up to Sears and bought one of thier new scanners copied the win32 drivers from the install disk and returned the scanner. that was the last time I bought ANYTHING from logitec. BLAH.......
sorry for the off topic rant......