Is mousetrapping unfair?

Abstract

Like telemarketing at dinnertime, mousetrapping is one of those things you have to experience to appreciate. The frustration it engenders is part of what makes you decide whether you hate it enough to want to make it illegal. I can’t give you that experience with the printed page, but I can point you toward a toneddown version of it. I teach copyright and patent law relating to computer programs and the Internet at The George Washington University Law School. Part of my pedagogical theory is that telling is insufficient in this legal field and must be supplemented by showing, to give students a proper appreciation of the issues. On the course’s Web site, therefore, I’ve provided simulated forms of mousetrapping and related practices. If you want to experience some personal frustration of your own from mousetrapping, go to http://www.law.gwu.edu/ facweb/claw/Mousetrap1.htm. By the time this issue of IEEE Micro reaches you, I should have debugged the code enough for it to work. If not, you can e-mail me and tell me that I don’t know enough how to write code to be a law school professor and that you do. My mousetrapping isn’t really mousetrapping, anyway; it’s more like mouse hindering. There are only a few alert boxes to grab your system, and they stop before you become infuriated. Real mousetrapping grabs control of your browser and won’t let go. It grays out the back button and all back lines of dialog boxes (such as that for the Apps key on the bottom line of the Windows keyboard, between WIN and Ctrl). It can also disable the X box on the top right of your screen. Any attempt to escape just brings up the same or another pop-up window or alert box. Sometimes a flurry of Alt-F4 hits permits escape by closing the browser. Sometimes nothing but the three-finger salute (Ctrl-Alt-Del) works. Sometimes even that won’t work, and the power-off switch is your only escape. Mousetrapping gained public attention recently through litigation that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and enraged commercial victims have brought against several kings of Internet mousetrapping, notably John Zuccarini (sued for this practice over 60 times in recent years). These cases have focused mainly on trademark and unfair-competition theories of wrongdoing—as well as simple copying infringements under copyright law, because of the relationship of mousetrapping to