• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, April 13, 2006

After Direct Revenue introduced its notorious "Aurora" ad-serving program last April, the program was deemed so harmful that even the company's official business partners--including peer-to-peer service Kazaa and ad-serving network FastClick--balked at being associated with the adware company. Those are among some of the revelations to come to light in connection with the lawsuit against Direct Revenue filed last week by New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer.

A host of e-mails between Direct Revenue and its business partners, as well as internal Direct Revenue messages, vividly illustrate the frustration of Direct Revenue's business partners with the company's ad-serving strategies. They also reveal Direct Revenue's efforts to deliberately mislead business partners, install ad-serving programs without consent, serve almost incessant pop-up ads, and make it difficult to uninstall the software.

The documents were attached as exhibits to the lawsuit filed by Spitzer against Direct Revenue. The suit alleged that Direct Revenue unlawfully installed pop-up-serving software on consumers' computers through at least September of 2005. Anti-spyware researcher and Harvard graduate student Ben Edelman recently posted them on his Web site. (Direct Revenue's business partners named in the documents have not been accused of wrongdoing by Spitzer.) Direct Revenue did not respond Wednesday to a request for comment.

One set of e-mails reveals that last spring, after Direct Revenue introduced Aurora--a program that quickly became reviled because it installed surreptitiously and was particularly hard to remove--ad network FastClick demanded that Aurora stop serving its ads.

On June 17, 2005, a FastClick executive e-mailed Direct Revenue to ask that FastClick ads be removed from Aurora. The e-mail followed one dated June 8, complaining about the program. "I have personally been hit it [with] the program on my home PC and it was extremely difficult to remove," the FastClick executive wrote.

A spokesperson for ValueClick (which recently completed a merger with FastClick) said that FastClick completely stopped using Direct Revenue to distribute ads by last July.

Another e-mail dated Aug. 16, 2005 indicated that file-sharing service Kazaa--which started bundling its software with Direct Revenue last summer after adware company Claria terminated its contract with Kazaa--was concerned about the company. "Had a difficult call with Kazaa today," company officer Daniel Kaufman wrote. "Part of the trouble is that they have been living with our adclient for a while and feeling first-hand the user experience."

One topic that repeatedly arose within Direct Revenue, and between the company and business partners, concerned Direct Revenue's resistance to code its software so that a user could remove it automatically by using the Install/Uninstall function on Windows.

A Feb. 2 2005 e-mail by company officer Daniel Kaufman lamented that Morpheus--a peer-to-peer service that bundled its product with Direct Revenue--had required the company to offer consumers a simple way to remove the adware. "If the data is correct that so many [M]orpheus users are uninstalling, then I think it's clear that we don't want to have such an easy uninstall unless we have no choice," Kaufman wrote. "The options appear to be no uninstall or a much more difficult uninstall when it's left to our discretion."

Earlier, e-mail correspondence indicated that Direct Revenue guaranteed one business partner it would enable an automatic uninstall function, then reneged. In an e-mail dated September 29, 2004, with the subject line "distribution concerns," a Direct Revenue executive admitted: "[W]e promised them an uninstall and then when we thought they weren't watching any more, removed it on purpose."

Additionally, Direct Revenue executive Christopher Dowhan acknowledged in a Jan. 26 deposition that the company's adware sometimes installed itself, if users had their security settings set at low levels.

After Spitzer filed the lawsuit last week, Direct Revenue released a statement denying it had broken the law. Direct Revenue's lawyer, Andrew G. Celli, Jr., last week told OnlineMediaDaily: "We believe that the past practices were legal at the time, and are legal--and are certainly consistent with what every major adware company was doing in the industry."