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Website developers and owners are outraged by a new browser plug-in from EZula that allows the company to sell advertisers hyperlinks from popular keywords such as “home business” and “cars” contained in the text of webpages. Dubbed TopText, the plug-in embeds itself into the web browser of consumers who download and install file-sharing programs from iMesh. Once installed it works on all webpages; as a website owner there is currently no way to block these ads.

TopText highlights certain keywords in yellow, which are linked to an advertiser. For example, a iMesh subscriber visiting the website of a car dealer might see the keyword “cars” hyperlinked and highlighted in yellow, with the advertising link clicking through to a competitor's website.

Advertisers pay on a cost per click basis for the advertising, with the cost for clicks ranging between 30 cents and $1, said EZula co-founder Henit Vitos. With cost per click advertising the advertiser only pays when a consumer clicks on a paid link. The real catch to Ezula's system is that these ad revenues go to the plug-in creator, not the owner of the website where the ads are displayed.

Microsoft decided to drop a similar piece of technology, called Smart Tags, from its newest operating system Windows XP in response to concerns that the tags gave the company greater control over the way consumers use the Internet. The planned feature, which was originally included in Office XP, scans keywords in user documents and offers links to related websites, many of them operated by Microsoft entities or partners.

The new advertising technique has raised a host of issues, including a debate over whether or not it infringes on intellectual property rights, copyright laws and consumer rights. Critics say EZula's TopText technologies are like taking a newspaper off a reader's doorstep, pasting new ads over the paper's ads, and handing it back to the reader.

Brad Limpert, a lawyer and patent agent at Gowlings in Toronto and former professor of intellectual property law at the University of Toronto, has similar views.

“In terms of the trademark usage, if you had a website for one person and the Smart Tag directed you to the website of a competitor, there might be some confusion about whose product or service was really being sold,” says Limpert. “I think there's a possibility for the perception that there's some sort of breach of confidentiality. You don't necessarily want the software interpreting what you're typing and make reference to other websites even if it does give you the option whether you want to click on the link or not.”

“The bottom line is that people have to be very careful about reading the contracts that they're signing,” cautions Limpert. “The average shrink-wrapped contract that comes with a product like a windows operating system or the office suite of products is very complicated. So often it will contain rights around these things like Smart Tags that most people don't even contemplate and if they had some opportunity to give it some thought they might really think about whether that's the sort of deal they want to strike with the software supplier like Microsoft and in that case they might want to question whether they would like to somehow have that modified."

The ad tactic is particularly harmful to smaller websites that need advertising to stay in business, the Orange County resident said. “This has the potential to kill independent content and just leave it to the big guys,” said Wilson, who started www.scumware.com as a forum to protest the new ad medium and pressure advertisers to shy away.

You can block Smart Tag links from being included in your webpage by including the following line of code, known as a meta tag, in the source code all of your wepages: meta name="MSSmartTagsPreventParsing" content="TRUE"

However, there is currently no way to remove TopText ads from your pages, which can only be done on the consumer's end. As a consumer, you can uninstall TopText if it has already been installed, and can also avoid installing this or similar plug-ins when downloading file-swapping programs from companies like Kazaa and iMesh.

EZula's Vitos has said that they try to limit the number of Top Text words that appear to two or three per page.

Additional resources:
Has Top Text been installed into your browser? You can find at scumware, where a box on the main page tells you whether or not the plug-in is installed:
http://www.scumware.com

Author Info

Jondrea Liddie is a freelance writer in Brampton, Ontario.