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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."
So, lemme ask: Would you allow me to install some software on your phone line that would interject with advertisements from time to time? No. You pay for a specific service with your phone line and you don't want to have to be interrupted with ads when you are talking with family, friends or business partners. If this lawsuit is accepted, then one would not have any protection to prevent ads from appearing during your phone calls. As a resident of Utah, I am not usually happy with all of the legislation that occurs up on capitol hill here, but this is one bit of legislation that I fully support.
From the suit: "private enforcers, motivated by the act's draconian penalties and the promise of attorneys' fees, may still seek to sue WhenU for allegedly violating the act."
Well, yeah. That is just the point folks. I don't want spyware on my system. (one of the many reasons I use a Macintosh)
Thus, the act presents WhenU with the impossible choice of either foregoing constitutionally protected advertising and spending significant sums to comply with the act (thereby reducing the effectiveness of its business), without any guaranty that it will avoid liability in doing so, or else being subjected to millions of dollars of claims by private litigants."
No, actually. It is quite simple: Go out of business. Your business model is corrupt and unwanted by both consumers and legitimate businesses. We don't want you here and you can't force yourself on consumers that do not want you. That is the point of the law, the people have spoken and the legislators have listened and responded. And NO.....you don't have a constitutionally mandated right to invade my privacy. That is what it really comes down to.
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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?"
In other news: Microsoft sues the United States over antitrust laws....crap now I'm giving them ideas.
Pretty widgets? What pretty widgets?
Imagine if WhenU wins. I can just see the massive amounts of viral spam that will flood the internet. People will begin writing viruses for the sole purpose of spreading their advertisements. No longer will they just mislead and trick helpless users into installing their "applications," but also they'll be proactive and force people to install their "applications" by exploiting bugs in common e-mail clients and internet browsers.
The good side is that the problem is self healing. If they lose, no problem it's all good. If they win, spammers will take it too far and it will get repealed.
I can count to 1023 on my hands. Ask me about #132.
Maybe, if they didn't have their software installed unwantingly by hidden methods of attaching to other software and trick pop-ups, then they wouldn't have laws passed against them. Of course, at the same time, nobody in their right mind would install their crap. I mean seriously, who would be excited about some new freeware they found that redirects their surfing and increases their amount of popup ads. Even when they don't have a browser open.
The Supreme Court has ruled numerous times that commercial speech (advertising) can be restricted. It's not the same as political speech which gets a much higher level of protection.
Do they actually provide any measurable service to the users who use their product?
They sell advertising. Advertising is legal. But in order to sell advertising, they have to own or otherwise pay for the right to use the medium that they use to advertise.
If you own a building with a billboard, you can sell that space.
If you provide some form of media (print, tv, movies, or internet), you can sell advertising.
This company and others like it, do not own your pc, they are not your ISP, and they are (probably?) not providing some form of service to you.
So what right do they have to advertise to you, or sell information from your PC, beyond the end user being stupid enough to agree to some liscence?
END COMMUNICATION
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'm not familiar with WhenU's software, but I find this hard to believe
It is hard to believe, 'cause it isn't true. WhenU installs are also a pain in the arse to remove.
My dad recently downloaded some desktop weather software (though I'm not sure why he wants to know the weather of his desktop), and this junk installed with it. I tried to duplicate the problem by installing on another machine, and was never informed that it [whenu] was installing. Luckily i tried it on a test VM, so I didn't get the pleasure of uninstalling twice.
I consider spyware and adware publishers to vandalists. I work at the help desk at my local ISP and I spend more time explaining to people what spyware is and why we can't fix their computers for them then anything else. Sure many times you have to click shady license agreements, but I myself have personally seen how easy it is to be bombarded with illegitimate software. I run spybot and Adaware often and use the immunization features and usually only browse with Firefox yet last week I still got "infected" with 5 different spyware apps simultaneously. They killed my Winsock stack. Luckily I know how to repair XP with my eyes closed but to 99% of the users out there this would send them running to a computer repair shop with their wallets open. Unfortunately, most users are ignorant that spyware even exists and blame their manufacture or worse, their ISP, for their computer slowing to a crawl. They don't understand that a microchip doesn't deteriorate with age, but the software running on it sure can. It's pretty sad when I have to tell a 90 year old woman trying to get her grandkids emails that she has to find someone else to fix her PC for her because she downloaded software to make her IE have pretty skins. Advertising is one thing if you agree to it as a means to keep consumer costs down, but when those ads corrupt a computer to useless that's not very cost effective. My company is thinking about charging to support spyware repairs but you don't want to even know how much that'll cost granny. For now I guess it's just sorry, but we can't support that. (We're not really mean about it, we often spend many hours in Regedit or MSConfig but there's only so much you can tell a novice over the phone plus time is money. We have real network issues to fix first.)
LOOP1: MOV CX,2 LOOP LOOP1
"If some brick-and-mortar company spray painted their ads on the side of my house"
I think you're onto something there... *cough*
Ahem, can someone give me a list of spyware companies' addresses? I need some physical space to place a little advertising...
If WhenU.com is unhappy about Utah law, I can only imagine how they will respond if either the proposed Software Principles Yielding Better Levels of Consumer Knowledge (SPYBLOCK) Act or the Controlling Invasive and Unauthorized Software Act is passed and signed into law.
These bills have been covered by:
PC World
InfoWorld
ComputerWorld, and
TechNewsWorld
Only Women Bleed (Sex, Sharia remix)
Now this isn't a troll, because common sense tells me that spyware should not be allowed to operate the way it does today, but... From legal perspective, don't users agree to install spyware and accept its activities via those click-through EULAs that come with various "free" downloads?
The issue seems not to be spyware, but not adequately warning users of what is being installed on their systems. It would seem to make more sense to pass legislation that requires standard, plainly and prominently shown notification of what habits a program tracks and what sort of advertising it does, shown on its own page before installation. A blanket ban seems a bit extreme.
On another note, spyware seems to invade my system even though I am pretty saavy and do all I can to avoid it. It would appear some companies take advantage of IE exploits to stick these things on my system, but I can't say for sure.