U-Haul, 1-800 Contacts Join Anti-Pop-Up Bandwagon
from the trespassing? dept
It seems that Gator isn't alone in pissing off companies by putting popups of competitors over certain sites. U-Haul and 1-800 Contacts both have decided to sue some company named Where-U that places additional pop ups on their sites, that link to competitors of U-Haul and 1-800 Contacts. While I think any spyware company that uses pop-ups deserves to be sued just for being annoying, I'm not convinced that what they're doing is actually illegal.
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You don't see why it's illegal?
Imagine if someone created a TV set-top box that let everyone (legally) get a channel for free that would normally be a pay channel, but in return it was going to replace all the ads on all the other channels with the ads of their choosing.
The people who are watching the TVs sure aren't going to care, but the people who paid for the ads that you were supposed to be watching (and that paid for the programming on all those other channels) sure have a right to demand a portion of their money back (i.e., if 20% of consumers have this particular set-top box, then they should only have to pay 80% of the standard rate for commercials).
It's even worse if instead of just random ad replacement it's intentionally replacing an ad for a hauling company (U-Haul) with a competitors (Where-U), as appears to be the case here.
This reminds me of the cursor-jacking that Comet Cursor was (is?) involved with and the various online airline ticket purchase sites.
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Re: You don't see why it's illegal?
In some ways, it's similar to the situation in Silicon Valley right next to Oracle's headquarters. There's a billboard right on the highway as you pass the offices that always seems to be rented out to an Oracle competitor. Right now I think it's IBM. However, I remember a few years back when Informix had it, and they painted it to read: "You just passed Oracle. So did we."
If anything, I think all pop up ads should be illegal for "trespassing" - but I doubt that's what's going on here.
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Re: You don't see why it's illegal?
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interesting
I would think placing and ad over a competing website would cause consumer confusion, especially because many people don't realise the ad is not coming from the website they are visiting... hey that sounds like a really good way to ban popups completely.
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