Forum Moderators: skibum
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A U.S. judge declined on Wednesday to block a purveyor of computer "pop-up" ads, saying they were unlikely to confuse Internet users searching for home loans or other financial services.
[story.news.yahoo.com...]
After all, customers have a right to choose to listen to anyone's sales pitch anywhere and at any time, right?
Popping up your ads or coupons at someone else's site is equivalent to trespassing. It's an unfair business practice. Sites cost money to design and run, and businesses do not invest money to help their competitors distribute coupons and recruit customers.
I hope someday one of these cases will come up in front of a judge with some real knowledge of the Internet.
Isn't this like saying it's OK for Wal-Mart employees to run through the aisles of Kmart, shouting, "We have better prices! Shop at Wal-Mart instead!" and shoving coupons into the customers' faces?
Nope. It's like the customer inviting salesmen from competing companies to visit the customer's house at the same time. Annoying as hell if you're the salesman, but it is the customer's house.
Likewise, we never own the screen. It's the user's computer, and getting legal control of what software they run is a bad, bad precedent. Any law that lets sites say "no popups" is a step away from a law that lets sites say "no Google toolbars", which is a step away from a law that lets sites say "no Netscape browsers". We'd be handing the web over to big corporations.
I don't know about you, but I still enjoy freedom more than profit, especially when it's the freedom that's allowing me to make the profit.
What needs to be addressed is the deceptive way in which many of the users unwittingly get WhenU.
You might just as well say it's OK to install a program on home TVs that covers up legitimate advertising (for which advertisers pay a pretty penny) with someone else's ads. After all, the consumer owns the TV, so anything goes, right?
But Mfishy is right, the deceptive way in which the programs are installed is the most important issue.
Isn't this like saying it's OK for Wal-Mart employees to run through the aisles of Kmart, shouting, "We have better prices! Shop at Wal-Mart instead!" and shoving coupons into the customers' faces?
Yea, I would say that is a pretty good camparison but it isn't illegal to do this, just as the judge decided in this case. Now, since it is Kmart's business they are allowed to make the Walmart employee leave. They couldn't get them arrested!
You might just as well say it's OK to install a program on home TVs that covers up legitimate advertising (for which advertisers pay a pretty penny) with someone else's ads. After all, the consumer owns the TV, so anything goes, right?
I do say it's OK to install programs on home TVs, with the owner's consent. If you gave the content producers control over what we could hook up to TVs, they would have outlawed VCRs [sit.wisc.edu].
I have a constitutional right to hook up gadgets to TVs I own and install software on computers I own. Having your site on the screen doesn't change that. The weird "website copyright" arguments people make fly in the face of several centuries of legal precedent. It's like trying to outlaw people writing in books.
