It's not a requirement that a claim have merit for it to wreak havoc. It also serves as a shot across the bow of smaller purveyors who can't afford to enter legal battles. Whatever the case, it's laughable to those of us looking in from the outside. But I'd imagine it is causing some level of agita to some along the way.
Speaking of infringements and rights, here's an interesting piece from today's New York Times (below) that's got to be creating a lot of buzz. But rights to what, exactly? Screen space? Eyeballs? Bandwidth along the pipe? Who's pipe is it, anyway? The story below actually, and in more than one way, exposes the lie that is the all-you-can-eat Internet and the ecosystem that underpins it, for its preponderance of largely unspoken, much less contractually-sanctioned, ways. Should screen-space, browser displays and the specific bandwidth that is used to carry a Web site's content --including the ads that pay its way, be assigned the same level of legal protections as licensed spectrum? I look forward to comments on this most interesting of latter day conundrums.
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Web Fight: Blocking Ads and Adding Art
By Andrew Adam Newman | May 14, 2007
nytimes.com
There has long been a cat-and-mouse game between Web advertisers, which pay to place their messages on sites where people view content, and ad-blocking services, which let people hide those messages from their browsers.
Steve Lambert, a conceptual artist, plans to add his own twist to one type of software that blots out commercial messages. His add-on will replace the display ads — which are usually papered over with blank windows — with curator-picked artwork from contemporary artists.
On a recent afternoon, Mr. Lambert demonstrated a test version of AddArt at the Chelsea studios of Eyebeam, a nonprofit arts and technology center where he has a fellowship. Mr. Lambert opened the Fox News Web site on his computer, and both the banner ad at the top of the page and a rectangular ad on the bottom were replaced with a bald eagle illustration. (He is using stock art rather than original work at this point, which can be downloaded from www.addart.eyebeam.org.)
Mr. Lambert, 30, said he and Evan Harper, an artist, are not starting from scratch, but rather were modifying the program Adblock Plus. “Why reinvent the wheel when you can insert a gear and make it run backwards?” said Mr. Lambert.
Far from taking umbrage, the developer of Adblock Plus, Wladimir Palant, who lives in Norway, wrote in an e-mail response to questions, “Replacing annoying and obtrusive ads with some eye candy, turning them into their exact opposite, is a consequent continuation of what Adblock started — making the Web endurable and enjoyable.”
As open-sourcers, Mr. Lambert and Mr. Palant give away software and encourage others to tinker with it, which they believe improves the Internet by putting users’ interests over commercial ones. They have renounced their intellectual property rights to join a community where, in a sense, when everyone kicks off their shoes, stepping on someone’s toes is not an issue.
Firefox, the four-year-old browser developed by the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation, does not have proprietary code like the leading browser, Microsoft Internet Explorer, that precludes users from developing such add-ons without paying licensing fees. Adblock Plus — like AddArt — works only with Firefox, the second-most-popular browser, with 15 percent of the market share, according to Net Applications (Internet Explorer leads with 78 percent, Safari is third with 5 percent).
Ad blockers that cost money for other browsers — with exterminator-worthy names like Ad Killer and AdBeGone — also are popular. According to Forrester Research, 53 percent of consumers had ad-blocking software on their computers in 2006, up from just 21 percent in 2004.
But being part of a larger trend does not make blocking ads sit any better for those in the online advertising business.
“There ultimately has to be a balance established where consumers recognize that if they don’t take the ads, there won’t be free content,” said Dave Morgan, founder of Tacoda, a Web advertising firm. In fact, EnvironmentalChemistry.com, a news and educational site, in 2004 began blocking anyone with ad-blocking software.
Kenneth Barbalace, its owner, said that heavy traffic on the site kept exceeding his available bandwidth, costing him up to $300 more monthly. Meanwhile, 10 percent of users were blocking ads, so he bid them adieu to reduce his traffic — and expense.
“A user who comes to my site and is blocking the ads is essentially denying me the ability to pay for the content that they are getting to access for free,” said Mr. Barbalace, who lives in Portland, Me. He said he found himself in “a little arms race” with software developers: they would rewrite the program to access his site, and he would in turn rejigger it to block them.
Finally, in 2006, Mr. Barbalace called a truce. Bandwidth is much cheaper now, and his ad revenue is way up. Plus, all the extra code he wrote for the site to keep ad blockers out made the pages load slowly. “I saw the 5 or 10 percent of people using ad blockers as an annoyance, as a philosophical problem, but not as a business problem,” Mr. Barbalace said.
Mr. Lambert recently got private financing to complete the AddArt software. He still is seeking "a few thousand dollars," he said, for stipends for both the curators to choose work and the "young, contemporary artists" who will be featured.
“If you hate the artwork, there is a way you could turn it off until the show was over,” Mr. Lambert said. “I don’t make money from this, so if it bothers some people, that’s O.K. Art should bother some people.”
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