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Intuit Sued Over Product Activation

Posted by michael on from the just-desserts dept.

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."

2 of 393 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I really agree with this by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Product activation is *always* bad. I pay for my software. Even donation-ware and shareware. Heck, I even buy CDs from Red Hat and FreeBSD Mall. Gives me a warmFuzzyFeeling(tm).

    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.

  2. Re:I really agree with this by Goldberg's+Pants · · Score: 5, Interesting

    There's also the new protection from Macrovision that some games (Mechwarrior 4 Mercenaries for example) use that install a program that monitors what you burn to CD, and has been reported to destroy your ability to burn *ANY* CD in some cases. It's nasty. It runs as a service in XP (look for C-Dilla in the services... Macrovision bought C-Dilla), and if you get rid of it, delete the files it installs, it reinstalls the next time you run the software UNLESS you run it as a limited user. (Of course, doing that means you can't save your config in the game.) If you delete the DLL in the game directory that it calls, the game then won't load.

    The companies have become so hellbent on stopping piracy (which their techniques don't. Don't believe me? Check IRC sometime) that they no longer seem to care about fucking over the legit consumer. (Witness the number of problems people have with SecuROM and Safedisc "protected" titles.) All they do with these routines is stop the casual copier, but everyone I know just downloads the titles anyway. I can't remember the last time anybody I know engaged in "casual copying". Macrovision and Sony (they created SecuROM) have pulled the biggest scam ever on the software companies by persuading them to pay for their crappy "protection".

    Side note: Always amuses me in the warez groups .nfo files where they tell you what the protection was:)