Gator sues IAB

the best defense is....

[rcjordan]

"Claiming that it's had enough of the Interactive Advertising Bureau's "unfounded accusations and threats," startup Gator.com is suing the New York-based industry association and seeking to clear its name."
story here [internetnews.com]

[bigjohnt]

They are all done. IAB members have an enormous amount of clout, and the issue is fairly clear, if brought back to principles. MS would not have backed down from Sm@rtt@gs if they didn't think they would be found wrong.(Bowing to public outcry is not something they do. Its all about the money.)

Gator obviously does not have the brains to understand that what they are doing is the same thing. Nor do they understand that if the IAB as a body condemns them, they will be hurting for large advertisers.
Gator will spend all its VC money in legal fees, and lose.
Bu-bye.

<rant>If I am completely and totally wrong, wouldn't any site that makes its money from advertising block the damn reptile anyway? Now THERE is another suit waiting to happen - a class action suit against Gator for forcing website owners to spend their own resources to defend their sites from theft of revenue. No better than hackers in my book. Defacing websites, driving traffic away from the intended destination, alienating visitors.</rant>

[Drastic]

This is going to be big. Why? The outcome of this battle will likely set the precedent for Smart Tags, Surf+, TopText, adblockers, et al.

When ad blockers came on the scene a while back, it didn't bother me much. Banner revenue was nose diving and their use was very limited. When SmartTags appeared, and threatened textual advertising, I stood up and took note. Now, with toptext gaining a decent user base by being bundled with a semi-popular napster replacement, I can see a snowball potential problem. This is affecting web advertising in a big way, and it can get much bigger.

This is even bigger than just advertising, however. The real issue here is changing a web page on the client side, and is that legal. This will affect everyone in the end, advertising revenue or not.

I see the issue very clearly, as I am sure many of you do. However, could we have biased opinions? If we are right, will our legal system be able to hand down the correct decision? This is a cause for great concern to me.