Brad’s Sketchpad

I spent the fall of 2004 researching the cryptic business practices of a New York City adware company called Direct Revenue. In my Newsweek.com story, aiming to be fair-minded, I gave Direct Revenue CEO Joshua Abram a chance to respond to my allegations against his firm. He insisted that his company had done nothing illegal and that it was cleaning up its business practices.

Apparently, that was simply not true. Today, Eliot Spitzer, the attorney general of New York, filed a civil lawsuit against Direct Revenue, Abram and his three cofounders. The hundreds of pages of evidence and allegations are startling, even to someone who has followed the firm closely. They include internal emails that show a breathtaking disregard for the pain of PC users who inadvertently installed Direct Revenue software. You can read Spitzer’s complaint here.

The suit enters my article into evidence and says on page 66 of the petition, “as the company and its infected base of users grew, mainstream publications also began to criticize the company for deceptive spyware downloads and reinstalls after deletion. In December 2004, Newsweek published an expose about the company, harshly criticizing its business practices. Yet the individual respondents eventually became blase even about the shame of operating one of the most reviled companies in America.”

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