Lunch at the Labs
Stuff I used to talk about during lunch at AT&T and Bell Labs. You are visitor
Apparently a company named Gator Corp offers free software to automatically fill in WWW forms, but which also delivers pop-up ads tailored to the web site being viewed. (BTW Mozilla also has automatic filling in of previously visited forms, but without the ads.) Dow Jones & Co is suing Gator, arguing that a third party does not have the right to sell and display ads while users are viewing their web sites like the Wall Street Journal. Gator has a novel defense (IMO) claiming it's "akin to placing one's coffee cup on top of the morning newspaper -- the cup covers a portion of the newspaper page, which may be subject to copyright protection, but it does not alter the newspaper." I think the publisher will win on this one but who knows. But then what if the pop-up ad is changed to a pop-under one? This also raises the question, are image and ad blocking/filtering programs illegal because they infringe the publisher's copyright by changing the appearance of their web page(s). I think not in this case but again who knows. If it's legal to watch a TV program broadcast in color on a black and white TV set, why not this?
IMO, no one has benefited more from the rise of the WWW than the legal profession.