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Spyware Company Sues Utah Over Anti-Spyware Law
cgibby98 writes "An earlier Slashdot article talks about how web businesses oppose Utah's new spyware law. A story in Tuesday's Deseret Morning News says that WhenU.com filed suit Monday against the state, its governor, and attorney general, trying to keep the law from going into effect next month. The lawsuit claims the law violates WhenU's constitutionally-protected right to advertise."
"WhenU's software, one of the apparent targets of the act, is installed only with user consent, and does not invade the privacy of computer users..."
I'm not familiar with WhenU's software, but I find this hard to believe. Can this statement be defined with the same style of deceit that seems to encompass adware companies? Anyone who knows of their spyware's habbit's please shed some light on this.
The law also curbs pop-up advertising on the Internet and calls for penalties of $10,000 per violation.
That's quite significant for a pop-up, don't you think? I mean I'm 100% against that kind of advertising, but $10000 seems incredibly steep.
Wireless News www.DailyWireless
Give me a break! Their argument is ridiculous! The "right to advertise"?! When they're using MY hard drive, MY CPU cycles, and MY bandwidth to do it?! If some brick-and-mortar company spray painted their ads on the side of my house, or hooked up the lighting for their billboard to my electrical socket, then surely that's not protected under the "right to advertise"... especially if they are using ads that are "stolen" from their competitors...
I'm not saying that this is a great law, especially since it's basically one advertiser fighting against another advertiser, but still, enough with the constitutional rhetoric already, what we're talking about is people hijacking personal property, be it my computer or some other company's advertisements! Just give me a choice (even if it's buried in the EULA) and get on with it! Like it's that hard to throw in a window saying "Do you want to install this?"
then I think they are playing with fire, because it can easily be alleged that they are violating other constitutional rights such as rights to privacy and protection from unreasonable search.
You see, if they want to make bogus charges, we can too.
P.S. IANACLBIDSAAHELN
(I am not a constitutional lawyer but i did stay at a Holiday Express Last Night)
-- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to
I for one can say that spyware companies have cost our company at least 200+ hours of my time of un-installing them and running ad-aware, which still doesn't even get rid of all of them. We ran ad-aware on a computer the other day and found 560 something pieces of spyware, now how come we cannot sue these companies for costing others time and money? We do the same thing if somebody defaces property, we make them pay for it so we don't have to waste our time and money on it. I am just waiting for someone to sue these companies, my bosses are both lawyers and I will be pressing them to do the same if someone else does it to show that it can be done!
If carrots got you drunk, rabbits would be fucked up. - Comedian Mitch Hedberg R.I.P. 03/30/68-2/24/05
Once the rights are back in the hands of the consumer, this will never be a problem. Oh, and I wish someone would excercise their LEGAL right to install a counter-measure in the same way that this scumware is installed.
My guess is that will only happend after someone will insert a major virus/ddos software under "protection" of EULA and then sue Anti-Virus companies to prevent them to adding the virus to their definitions.
RelevantElephants: A Somatic WebComic...
Would you allow me to install some software on your phone line that would interject with advertisements from time to time?
Funny you should mention that. By coincidence, I just got off the phone not two minutes ago with a Telus Mobility customer service rep. You see, this afternoon I got a text message advertisement.
This was extremely disruptive! Here I'm in a meeting, and my bloody phone starts ringing as if our server was down, and it turned out to be a stupid ad.
I was quite angry at this, being offended that I'm paying Telus to advertise to me, so I called them. What they told me? The only way to not receive the ads is to block ALL text messaging.
This infuriates me some more. So now I'm back to the old-fashioned: write a snail-mail letter (which I'll do) complaining and indicating that they'll lose me as a customer if they continue this bullshit.
If I keep getting ads, I'm switching to Fido.
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
You, sir (or in the unlikely event that this is the case, madam), are most enlightened.
The problem is that politicians rely on complex laws to keep themselves in office and reduce the power of individuals that aren't part of the ingroup. But don't break out the tin-foil hats just yet--I'm not claimin a conspiracy, just good old-fashioned capitolism. That's right, people striving to make their business thrive. In this case, it's the gov't.
This misses the deeper issue though. Why in the world does this company (or any one else) feel that advertising is a constitutional "right". I am guessing that this is another one of those sorry misinterpretations of "freedom to speech" that we hear about. The sad truth is that freedom of speech was never meant to be guaranteed for companies, just individuals. There is a huge difference between my claims and the claims of any corporate entity.
If advertising was truly free speech, then the laws about truth in advertising wouldn't fly (after all, making us tell the truth restricts our ability to promote our product). As it is, we have two essentially conflicting ideas.
The real problem is that, as you said, we have far too many laws that only a few people know anything about.
One solution would be to make congressmen have no salary, and then they would have to work for a living. This would mean that they wouldn't have time to sit around and think of new laws. Any country with professional politicians is certain to have trouble.
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
Corporations cannot use the 'bill of rights' since corporations have never explicitly been given any 'rights'. There have been judgements that have caused mass delusions within the legal profession that corporations have 'rights', but no changes have been made to the constitution to grant same 'rights' to corporations as those of citizens.
Corporations should-not/cannot be given the same rights as citizens. Corporations cannot be held to equal responsibilities as citizens, nor can be punished to equal measurements to citizens. Corporations have much more resources available to utilize the legal and/or government systems to their own purposes. The people responsible for running of corporations are not held responsible nor punished as harshly when found guilty.