• by October 21, 2005

Brad Greenspan, founder and former CEO of Intermix Media Inc., agreed to pay $750,000 to settle charges with New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer relating to adware. Among the accusations was that Greenspan ordered Intermix employees to bundle adserving programs--which trail consumers online and serve them pop-up ads--with other software, and also to make such programs hard to remove.

This summer, Intermix agreed to pay $7.5 million to settle charges brought by Spitzer relating to adware/spyware programs. Intermix also agreed to permanently stop distributing ad-serving programs. Neither Intermix nor Greenspan admitted wrongdoing as part of their separate settlements.

Shortly after the settlement between Intermix and Spitzer was announced, Greenspan said he gave a $50,000 grant to the Center for Democracy & Technology, a Washington, D.C. organization that campaigns against spyware.

In July, News Corp. reached a deal to purchase Los Angeles-based Intermix, parent company of popular social networking site MySpace.com, for $580 million.

Greenspan, who stopped acting as CEO two years ago but remained the company's largest shareholder, unsuccessfully tried to scuttle the deal. He outlined some of his objections to the deal on the Web site Freemyspace.com, and also went to court in a bid to block a shareholder vote. Despite Greenspan's efforts, the deal went through at the end of last month.