Forum Moderators: not2easy
It is a clear breach of copyright (they are creating a derivative work), but it is hard to catch them at it: unless you are a customer of that particular ISP. It would also be expensive to track down and sue ever ISP that does it.
Are their any technical measures that might work?
In that case, though you or I may see it as a rough deal, the customer may have selected that option.
I skimmed the 100 meter thread, and saw that most of the objections involve copyright theft claims; frankly, I doubt that holds water, as they don't appear to be altering the protected copy, just surrounding it with ads - if you had an article published in a newspaper, they'd do the same, and it would be none of your business, however much you hated seeing oil companies ads around your 'green' article!
Looks to me like a new tweak to achieve what advertisers have always sought; more control, more exposure. And what everyone else wants, when they're providing a service - more money.
As ever, consumers have a choice; as ever, it's limited, and as ever, they'll likely make the wrong one. I noticed one poster cited the early days of cable; "you pay extra for more channels, and less advertising". Right.
I'd like to think that no ISP would hold their customers for long; and there are plenty of others. But if they claim it makes ther service cheaper ...
Fair Eagle sells a hardware device that sits between the ISP and all customers. It attempts to insert the ad Javascript into all HTTP traffic. Redmoon has purchased this device, intending it for all home customers, ......
I don't like the sound of that at all, sending ads to customers that are aware of where they are coming from is one thing but this sounds as if it's inserting adds into pages.
I can see a lot of issues besides copyright, security issues comes to mind. Suppose it becomes compromised and someone comes to my site and gets a security warning, or worse yet gets infected with something and blames the site owner.
Then there's the possibility of it breaking layouts and other things.
[edited by: thecoalman at 1:46 pm (utc) on June 24, 2007]
they don't appear to be altering the protected copy, just surrounding it with ads
If they were, for example, framing content like Google images or some proxy services do, that would be correct. however they are actually altering your HTML page, see:[benanderson.net ]
All it needs is customers of Redmoon to take their accounts elsewhere.
As this scam is being widely discussed, I hope enough folk will do so to teach them a lesson or two. We'll see.
