News Publishers and Gator Reach Settlement

Gator Corporation, a service deliverer of pop-up ads, has reached a settlement with various publishers who sued Gator for planting unauthorized pop-up ads on their Web sites. Gator's eWallet software appears innocuous to consumers as it appears on their computer screen and offers to help remember users' password and shipping information for them. What the software does is record that information and all subsequent information as those users log on to other Web sites. Part of Ewallet's technology is configured to display pop-up ads over Web sites visited by the users who have registered their user information with Gator. The publishers claimed that Gator's pop-ups were not authorized on their Web sites and often obscured their own content and sponsored advertising. Publishers who sued Gator and won a preliminary injunction prohibiting Gator from displaying the ads include The New York Times Company, Washington Post Company, Dow Jones, Conde Nast and Gannett. The case was scheduled to go to trial in January, but was postponed while settlement talks were ongoing. The terms of the settlement were not made public, and Gator Corporation offered no comment about the settlement.