[IP] Genuine Advantage lawsuit
Begin forwarded message:
From: "Aleecia M. McDonald" <aleecia@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: June 29, 2006 11:31:55 AM EDT
To: David Farber <dave@xxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Genuine Advantage lawsuit
For IP if you wish.
A suit filed in Seattle court claims that Genuine Advantage is
spyware, and denied users the ability to make informed consent. Note
the carefully phrased denial from Microsoft:
"Spyware is deceptive software that is installed on a user's
computer without the user's consent and has some malicious purpose,"
I've looked at a lot of definitions of spyware, and "some malicious
purpose" is an interesting addition.
Lauren Weinstein appears to believe that consent is not at issue, but
rather the degree of damage:
"It doesn't seem to me that this particular incident rises anywhere
near the kind of damage that is normally associated with spyware,"
said Lauren Weinstein, co-founder of People for Internet
Responsibility. "That's not to say that Microsoft should have done it
the way they did. ... But that doesn't necessarily make it
illegal." [ellipses in original text]
Full article: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/
275780_msftsuit29.html?source=mypi
One of my concerns is that, politically, it is difficult to pass
Federal legislation that bans Microsoft's standard business
practices. It's been hard enough to approach a working definition of
spyware (see the good work of CDT's Anti-Spyware Coalition.)
Codifying what is, or isn't, spyware just got a whole lot more
difficult.
Aleecia
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