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Intuit Sued Over Product Activation
An anonymous reader writes "PCWorld is reporting: [Scott] Leviant's firm of Stanbury & Fishelman has filed a class-action lawsuit against Intuit in Los Angeles Superior Court on behalf of all U.S. purchasers of TurboTax software for the 2002 tax year. The suit alleges that Intuit engaged in unfair and deceptive business practices by failing to fully disclose the mechanisms and consequences of its product-activation technology before consumers pay for the software."
Battling the evil forces of Microsoft Money? Ahh, the good old days when things were black and white.
Okay, start taking bets to see if Stanbury and Fishelman will sue Microsoft for their similarly sinister product activation systems.. bet they don't!
I think product registration is a great idea, as it can help you get a better service and allows the company to get info on its users.. but forcing you to activate a product is just a Big Brother attitude.
How would you like it if you had to 'activate' your car every time you moved or made an upgrade to it? Sure, it might help the insurance companies a whole lot, but it's just not right. Ditto for software.
mogorific carpentry experiments
People can argue about the merits of this or that with product activation but the thing that really sucks here is the motivations and the way the law works. This is in effect a company touting for business saying "hey look we think a bunch of people could get cash here" its not that they have any real evidence of actual damage that was caused beyond people being a bit miffed.
What sort of legal system allows Lawyers to start procedings before they have plantiffs ? No other industry works like this, and in fact almost no other countries legal system works like this. This is a sickening example of how law suits can be created just because a lawyer needs a new Ferrari, NOT because there is real evidence of damage.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
is that we shouldn't need to buy a complex software package to figure out how much money the government is going to take out of our hides every year. Pass the Flat Tax and put Intuit and a helluva lot of accountants, lawyers, and lobbyists out of work.
Though that still leaves Microsoft's product activation. Oh, right, I'm running Linux. Never mind.
I remember the old days...
.... ahh the old days...
When if a product was well written and did its job, it would sell...
You could put a whole application on a 3.5" disk.
Printed manuals!
When you didn't need copy protection and activation screens. Piracy was more-or-less a marketing tactic more than something that cut into sales (and IMO it still is, but the software publishers don't want the public to know this)
Software companys generated revenue through customer loyalty (as opposed to customer extortion)
One software product had the audacity to recognize that other competing/complimentary products from other publishers did exist, and openly supported import/export functions
When most commercial software wasn't written in Pakastani or Indian programmer-warehouses.
Tech support telephone numbers weren't systemmatically hidden in a maze of FAQs, if at all, and they were 800 numbers.
You could install a software program without worrying if doing so would completely screw up your computer, other programs, or wipe out all your data.
When a "newer version" actually meant more features and functionality.
When the first version of a software package wasn't labelled "6.0"
When software was designed to work with the hardware and RAM you had installed in your machine, and didn't require you to upgrade to next generation crap in order to operate acceptably.
Yes, it is that product activation is bad all of the time.
I am against software piracy, and I've bought tax software every year from 1992 until last year (I still have every program). This year I'm doing my taxes by hand for the first time ever.
The problem with product activation is it turns the software from a product into a service. Even though I have the CD, I can't install the program with full functionality. When I buy software, I want to be able to run it forever. I still have a parition with DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11, mostly to play older games. I also run legal copies of Windows 98, Windows 2000, and Slackware. I do not run XP, and I won't as long as it has product activation.
I'm in Canada, but if I was in the US, I'd consider buying the software just to join the lawsuit.
Jason
ProfQuotes
I call good old-fashioned bullshit troll. Diffie-Hellman is a discrete-log public-key agreement algorithm with a signature algorithm (DSA) and encryption algorithm (Elgamal) loosely associated with it. It is not a compression algorithm. Oh, and the journal link is a bit of a giveaway.
Must you accept that for every copy of software sold that two will be pirated?
Draconian copy proiection does nothing to solve this - it just punishes legitimate users.
If you don't believe me, try going on Overnet (or eDonkey, Kazaa, etc.) and search for "turbo tax." I just turned up 13 hits for the full program, and about 60 hits for cracks for it.
Software companies learned back in the 80s that extreme copy protection just drives buyers away. That's why games don't come with those ridiculous code wheels and text-lookups-in-the-instruction-manual protection schemes any more.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
I installed TurboTax onto a clean Win2000 guest OS in VMWare. The only boot sector the activation routines got to touch was the one on the virtual drive. Oh, and after I installed TT (but before using it), I made a copy of the Win2000 guest OS file.
So if I wanted, hypothetically, I could copy that VMWare file to any other machine and run it from there.
I don't have any intention of copying or sharing the software. But it pisses me off that a) I had to take these measures to ensure the safety and stability of my real OS installation, and b) for all the possible danger to my machine if I'd installed it the normal way, it was trivial to circumvent.
Good move guys.
Vista:XPSP2::ME:98SE
Maybe they should sue users dumb enough to buy the product after hearing about this activation scheme. In case you haven't been paying attention, the activation prevents you from printing old returns if you change your computer hardware. You're supposed to keep old returns for 7 years and NO ONE keeps the same computer configuration for that long. Therefore, electronic copies of your returns become unprintable (therefore unusable)... not my idea of smart.
Writing to a congressperson with an opinion isn't a felony however, even if you're a little misleading about your citizenship.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
which their techniques don't. Don't believe me? Check IRC sometime
While it's been repeated a million times, it still needs to be said: Anti-piracy is about the average Joe, not dedicated pirates. These sorts of efforts are aimed at stopping Bob from spitting off a dupe of a game for Ted who is over to watch the game, not to thwart someone who'll jerk around in an IRC room all night trying to DCC a trojan packed distribution.
Wonderfully done, bravo. State the obvious (that anti-piracy targets non-hackers) and then mix in a little FUD (that IRC DCCs are "trojan packed distribution"s).
You get extra creativity points for painting those who would like to exercise their right to fair use with software as "someone who'll jerk around in an IRC room all night".
This lawsuit is a wake-up call (actually a RE-wake-up call since we've already been through this once before in the software arena) to software companies that have gotten too big for their britches: Don't piss off your customers...period.
--K.
Sig: Bad people happen. Try to avoid being one of them.
I pay for my software [...] I would NEVER pay for software that plays tricks with my hard drive, even if I needed it and the price was right. When I see software that does this, I get mad and pull out my eyepatch and put the parrot on my shoulder.
So are you saying that you do pirate software if it "plays tricks", or are you saying that you stop using and destroy all copies of the software in that case?
There's a big difference between "they tricked me, so I'll pirate the software" and "they tricked me - I'll refuse to use that software, even if I already paid for it."
Walking the line and saying "I pirate software when the software makes me mad" is not taking a stance.