(The following articles
have been archived for both instructional and reference purposes. To read the
full articles please follow the links to the source located at the bottom.)
Forbes.com - Control Geeks
Erika Brown, Forbes Global, 11.27.00
Dion Lim sits in the living room of his posh apartment high above downtown San
Francisco, comfy in black slippers and calmly talking about his new business while
holding hands with his wife. They are a lawsuit waiting to happen.
Dion and Amy Lim side with surfers tired of web ads. They may also be on the wrong
side of the law.
Last month Lim and his wife, Amy, each 32, released Bannerama,
free software that wipes out banner ads on websites and replaces them with content
of the user's choosing--tidbits on foreign languages, trivia and, eventually,
wine, cooking and golf. "People already use the natural blocking software
in their brains by ignoring banners," he says. "We want to give the
user the power to do what he wants with that space."
Lim, who earlier cofounded the popular Epinions.com site that lets users sound
off in product reviews, adds insult to injury.He plans to paste his own ads
over one in every four banners that his software will obliterate, piggybacking
on a slot paid for by someone else. "Some sites will be upset by this,"
he admits, but he isn't worried about lawsuits.
He should be. "Someone talking about replacing banner ads with ones he
sells is attempting a technology war," warns Christopher Kelly, the chief
privacy officer at ExciteAtHome. Lim could be liable for a website's loss of
ad impressions and any gains that he brings in, says David Kramer, a lawyer
at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati in Palo Alto, California. A court could
shut him down.
"The law does not like free riders--those who reap what they do not sow--and
that's clearly what this guy is doing," Kramer says.
A war is raging on the web, pitting ad-bombarded users against ad-selling websites.
At stake is nothing less than control of the PCscreen--what you can access on
the web, what you must look at and how closely others are allowed to watch you
while you do it.
Ad-blocking is but one front in this bout of electronic warfare. While websites
sharpen their techniques to track user behavior and make their ads ever more
personal, their nemeses forge tools that disable tracking, cover a website with
unauthorized commentary or replace original content with their own. In a sense,
they are personalizing the web right back.
Caught in between is the average web visitor, who is blasted with 520 marketing
messages each day and might have to endure double that clutter in a few years,
Jupiter Research estimates. (Yahoo spewed out 8.8 billion ad impressions in
just the past month or so.)
Read
the full article at Forbes.com ..
