See you later, anti-Gators?

In an effort to improve its corporate reputation, adware company Gator has
launched a legal offensive to divorce its name from the hated term
“spyware”–and so far its strategy is paying off.

In response to a libel lawsuit, an antispyware company has settled with Gator
and pulled Web pages critical of the company, its practices and its software.
And other spyware foes are getting the message.

“There is this feeling out there that they won the lawsuit, and people are
starting to get scared,” said one employee of a spyware-removal company, who
asked not to be named. “We haven’t been sued, but we’ve heard that other
companies are being sued for saying this and that, so we’ve changed our
language” on the company Web site.

Gator often distributes its application by bundling it with popular free
software like Kazaa and other peer-to-peer programs. When downloaded, Gator’s
application serves pop-up and pop-under ads to people while they’re surfing the
Web or when they visit specific sites. Ads can be keyed to sites so that a pitch
for low mortgage rates, say, can appear when a surfer visits a rival financial
company’s site.

The distinction between such “adware,” which can report back to its creator
with information about the computer user’s surfing habits, so as to allow for
supposedly more effective ad serving, and “spyware,” which similarly monitors
surfing habits and serves up ads, is sometimes a hazy one, and lies at the heart
of Gator’s libel suit.

Gator maintains that its software differs from spyware in that people are
clearly notified before they download it, and in that they do so in exchange for
a service, like the peer-to-peer software.

Spyware, the company maintains, is surreptitiously installed and gives the
unwitting computer user no benefit.

But critics of adware companies question how clearly such downloads are
marked–PC users may suddenly be deluged with pop-ups and have no idea where
they’re coming from–and protest that companies like Gator are collecting
information without sufficiently accounting for what they do with it.

The defendant in the Gator libel suit, PC Pitstop, offers software to cleanse
computers of spyware and other undesirable code, and until signing a preliminary
settlement with Gator on Sept. 30, vociferously targeted Gator’s application.

In settling the suit, which alleged false advertising, unfair business
practices, trade libel, defamation and tortious interference, PC Pitstop
apparently removed several pages from its Web site that referred to Gator’s
application as spyware–along with many that went beyond that to urge action
against Gator itself.

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