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AOL Settles Class Action Suit Over Client Software

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the katz-is-first-in-line dept.

An anonymous reader sent in news that AOL is settling a class action suit over their AOL 5.0 software, which usurped people's dial-up networking settings when installed. There's a website for the suit and a news article about the settlement. Of course, you have to admit you use AOL.

3 of 162 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Sick Numbers by geekoid · · Score: 3, Interesting

    exactly why I feel lawyers fees should be preset by tha bar. as an exapmple, lawyers would get 30% of the settlement, or an equal share, which ever is less.
    Class action lawsuit do not benefit the consumer. Imagine if everyone who installed AOL 5.0 got a shot in court? lets say each one got 50,000 dollars, plus expences, that would total up to a hell of a lot more then 15,000,000.

    Now itwhat? 6 million divided by 20,000,000 million users? and its a tierd pay off.
    Which really piises me off. because I fixed my own problem, I get less money.

    --
    The Kruger Dunning explains most post on /. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
  2. and for those of us who work for other ISPs... by Artifex · · Score: 4, Interesting

    and who had to do dialup support back when this came out, and had customers bitching and moaning at US because they were dumb enough to pop a CD someone mailed them into their computer... as always, there will be nothing.

    I swear, we should have kept track of the hours spent, and then billed AOL or something.

    --
    Get off my launchpad!
  3. This is just stupid... by coene · · Score: 2, Interesting

    $15M suit. $8M after lawyers fees. Maximum take per customer that files is $250 (DOLLARS). This seems like the kind of lawsuit that serves no purpose whatsoever. Software modifies your computer, thats all there is to it. From what I gather, there's nothing malicious going on by AOL, they just got users that complained that the aol software:

    -made itself default on the system. netscape tries todo this, hell even mozilla does this.

    -makes computers more instable. last i knew, AOL runs on windows. if you install ANYTHING, ittl make windows less stable. thats part of the game.

    -didnt allow users to connect to remote ISP's. this sounds like a DUN/RAS problem. so, readd the other ISP.

    I'm probably oversimplifying the small details, but all in all, this is plain stupid.

    People arent going to be taken seriously when real problems occur if people sue for this kind of stuff.