PCs Posted No Trespass

FreeLinux writes "USA Today has a story about a federal court ruling stating that Spyware can constitute illegal trespass. From the article: 'A federal trial court in Chicago has ruled recently that the ancient legal doctrine of trespass to chattels (meaning trespass to personal property) applies to the interference caused to home computers by spyware. Information technology has advanced at warp speed with the law struggling to keep up, and this is an example of a court needing to use historical legal theories to grapple with new and previously unforeseen contexts in Cyberspace.'"

Comments

Re:Makes Sense to Me

[Fiver-]

From TFA:

"One of the defendants supposedly has an end user license agreement pursuant to which computer users are to be informed that spyware will be installed. However, the plaintiff alleged that that defendant has three means by which to avoid showing this agreement to computer users."

in case you don't rtfa

[ecklesweb]

the court didn't rule the case in the plaintiff's favor. The court just denied a motion to dismiss the complaint. I'd say that there's still a way to go before any precedent is set.

Re:It might

[Anonymous Coward]

From the article description of the complaint:

One of the defendants supposedly has an end user license agreement pursuant to which computer users are to be informed that spyware will be installed. However, the plaintiff alleged that that defendant has three means by which to avoid showing this agreement to computer users.

In addition, the plaintiff asserted that the spyware is designed specifically to be difficult to remove from a computer once it is installed. Worse still, the plaintiff argued that computer users are bombarded with annoying pop-up advertisements by virtue of the spyware. ...

So the complaint addresses your issue. No surprise, really, who doesn't have an issue with this aspect of spyware?