Interesting filed against Gator for (effectively) putting pop-up ads on websites that it doesn’t own.
I’ll wait for the Blogospheric Legal Eagles to weigh in on this one, but seems to me there’s no case here. Gator’s agreement is with its users; if they agree that they are willing to have ads be served while surfing, the people who own the sites they happen to visit don’t seem to have much of a say about it.
Take an extreme example: What if I built a browser that had, covering the entire bottom half of a screen, a bigass add for Hair Club For Men. And I sold that browser to people to use.
So would the American Association of Sexy Bald Guys then have reason to sue me because people visiting their site with my new browser also see an add for the Hair Club? (Or try Ford on my browser and surfing to Toyatas site, if you want to keep it all strictly commercial).
Seems to me like that’s exactly what Gator is doing, just in a more sophisticated fashion…