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Kaspersky Wins Important Ruling for the Anti-Malware Industry
ABC writes "Zango sued Kaspersky Lab to force the Company to reclassify Zango's programs as nonthreatening and to prevent Kaspersky Lab's security software from blocking Zango's potentially undesirable programs. In the important ruling for the anti-malware industry, Judge Coughenour of the Western District of Washington threw out Zango's lawsuit on the grounds that Kaspersky was immune from liability under the Communications Decency Act."
(but this is /. anyway)
Ok, despite the marketing bias of the article, a decision against a malware vendor is always good, mainly if you have in mind which type of user will get these crappy things (w)installed.
!sig
Poor guy, that Coughenator...his lungs must be shot.
Nice decision. I thought Kaspersky was a Russian operation though, was there really standing to sue them in a US court?
OK, well on the box, why don't they just say "Removes spyware, malware, viruses... and Zango"
Wouldn't that take care of the legal problem?
Latewire
"the Communications Decency Act, part of which states: "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected, or any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to [such] material.""
I don't like this at all. It seems to me to indicate that my ISP can block me from p0rn, for my own good, and I have no recourse. And it doesn't matter if it is constitutionally protected material? WTF?
And yes, I think the immunity is for the right reasons: there are lots of advertisements and pieces of commercial attention-grabbing software that I don't want on my system. I don't care a hoot if that's fair or not w.r.t. whatever company thought they'd bring out such software. I just want to be able to prevent it from installing.
So any anti-virus software, anti-spyware software like Adaware is something *I* run, and what they remove or disable they do so on *my* authority.
I'm just relieved to see that not every random company out there can sue them for providing me the service I ask for on my own computer.
I have not read the full opinion yet, but I am at a loss to see how this fits under the CDA's definition of an "interactive computer service." I thought that Kaspersky, like most virus detection programs, ran as a process on the user's machine and only connected to a server for definitions updates. if so, I can't see how that classifies as an "interactive computer service" under the act. Then again, maybe I'm just not being creative enough in my statutory interpretation.
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.
I don't care what Kaspersky says, or that they aren't an American company, they are colluding with the feds on this whole CIPAV thing. All the feds had to do was threaten to make doing business difficult for them (and they have ways), and I guarantee you they folded like a cheap suit.
And god damn zango!
I mean that in the nicest possible way, of course.
Oh, and god damn their lawyers too.
I remember "back in the day" when spyware was still something you needed a separate scanner (Ad-Aware, Spybot S&D, etc..) for.
My pet theory was that since a lot of the spyware was coming from legit (but questionable) companies, the major antivirus players were afraid of touching it due to the threat of these kinds of lawsuits. Even though spyware and malware has since grown to such a pervasive problem that the big AV firms have gotten on board, I bet they were all watching the outcome of this suit. I for one am really happy that the ruling went in Kaspersky's favor, and shudder to think what would have happened if it hadn't.
Hopefully this ruling will send notice that you can't hide behind "restraint of trade" to keep antivirus / antispam programs from calling a spade a spade.
The Digital Sorceress
It will be interesting to see two things: 1) how this cause stands up when something like Nortan AV "accidentally" gets blocked; 2)IANAL, but shouldn't this cover DRM? It falls under otherwise objectionable at the very least (filthy too, IMHO).
lol: You see no door there!
In short because it contacts the Kapersky servers regularly for updates.
1) I'm unclear what law Kapersky violated that even allowed them to bring this suit. The closest thing I can find is "[Kapersky] has asked for unspecified monetary damages and an injunction forcing Zone Labs to cease its current classification of the products." but that's not clear enough.
2) The CDA provides protection for "any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, and harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected."
Why do we need a law that says a user can control what is installed on their computer? That's absurd!
But I want to know if Kaspersky will stop things like this. And what's going to happen if they do try to remove American government malware? Will they receive a "notice"?
What?
Upon install, have the user OK that the program will block anything that is believes to be dangerous (as in malware, virus, etc). Once the user has given permission, it does not matter what a 3rd party wants. ABout the ONLY party who has a case is MS, or Apple, or the unix or BSD company. This would probably not be needed for any GPL OS including Linux, Minix, HURD, etc as they gave nearly all rights to the end-user.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Using its own form, I sent a message to Zango congratulating it on losing the lawsuit.
Why don't all of you do the same?
zango.com
Fata viam invenient.
So what does this mean to actions to block Microsoft's famous Windows Genuine Advantage? I have a lot of respect for judges - sometimes they can slide a ruling and paint it so perfectly for the issue at hand that everyone applauds... and then hand their superior court a precedent for their higher level case
At what level is WGA different from Zango's claim, on the legal level?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
CDA is good? I'm confused.
I would assume because the user interactively sets a series of options on what malware is to be removed or scanned for.
Makes perfect sense to me.
The government can't block porn, but they can make it easier for others to do it. They can also make it more difficult for companies to make it available.
The government used 18 USC 2257 for that. 2257 requires the producers of porn to get IDs for the people in porn movies. Seems sensible, right? Well, they have played with it. 1. They only permit the use of US ID if you make it film (pictures, etc) in the USA (to get on the plane you have to show government ID). That means, the I can't do movies with the Swedish twins, Helga and Inga, from last weekend. 2. They require people who distribute (secondary producers) it to have the IDs on the models, and just think of the potential for stalkers -- Any horny geek can now start a web site, buy content, and get all the personal data on the porn actress.
Fight Spammers!
my ISP can block me from p0rn
Your ISP can absolutely block porn. Not just technically, but legally. They mostly don't because if they were to do so, then they would become more liable for the data that's transmitted via their service.
I say mostly because many ISPs are doing packet shaping in order to protect their bandwidth from torrent abuse, etc.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
You don't have to be an interactive computer service to get protection. Creators of utilities for this type of blocking are protected too. The utilities don't even have to be intended for use in an interactive computer service. See this part of the law text (copied from elsewhere in this discussion):
"or any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to [such] material"
The answer's in TFA, basically the entire penultimate paragraph. In part it says, "Users can adjust the settings to allow certain programs of their choice to come through at all times." That's interactivity.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
I acknowledged that point - that does not mean that it qualifies as an "interactive service" as that term is used by the statute.
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.
That does not seem to be enough to qualify as an "interactive service" as that term is used in the statute. Just the act of downloading updates fits a broad technical definition - but the statute is clearly focused on blogs, websites, email providers, and the like. That is what the term was intended to encompass. This seems like a stretch as far as statutory interpretation goes.
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.
Sorry, I should have been clearer. Yes, you did acknowledge the point, but that was exactly the point that the judge focused on in making the ruling. So whether or not that really makes it an interactive service, that is the thing that the judge believed made it an interactive service.
Consider all the spammers who threaten to file lawsuits against people for blocking their spam.
I've personally received several such threats myself, but nothing ever came of them.
With this to help, it would seem that the spammers couldn't possibly win a lawsuit unless it was malicious.
There have been blacklists who have blocked people they knew weren't spammers for other reasons. This obviously wouldn't shield those actions.
And here I was thinking beatniks were long gone... groove on brother!
I actually had to look up who they were, because I honestly had no idea. Not that I've never had to deal with spyware on a windows machine, just, I never paid enough attention to the names. I knew of Gator and Cool WWW Search by name before reading this.
I'm a little surprised they had the balls to bring a lawsuit about. Their hotbar apparently sends surfing habits back, they display pop ups, and it's somewhat of a bitch to uninstall -- my first question to their lawyers would be "So how are you NOT malware?"
The applicability of the statute to Zango itself raised eyebrows here. The article includes this text from the Act describing the content to which the statute applies: "obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable."
I take it Zango falls into the "otherwise objectionable" category? Who determines if something is "objectionable?" Isn't this term incredibly elastic? I doubt many members of Congress would have imagined the CDA covering Zango's software.
The word "filthy" is an amusing inclusion as well. Would this cover sites that show photos of children playing in mud?
This is, indeed, good news. I can't respect vendors who use deceptive practices, like Zango seems to do.
diginferno
Someone call me when it has the capability to Remove The Mother Of All Malware. I speak of course of Windows.
Insert witty comment *here*. I'm fresh out of wit...
The statute says:
"The term ''interactive computer service'' means any information service, system, or access software provider that provides or enables computer access by multiple users to a computer server, including specifically a service or system that provides access to the Internet and such systems operated or services offered by libraries or educational institutions."
So, yes, it's a bit of stretch for that to cover a piece of software that only incidentally uses a server. Oddly, the law has similar protections for an "access software provider", which seems to fit a bit better:
"The term ''access software provider'' means a provider of software (including client or server software), or enabling tools that do any one or more of the following:
(A) filter, screen, allow, or disallow content;
(B) pick, choose, analyze, or digest content; or
(C) transmit, receive, display, forward, cache, search, subset, organize, reorganize, or translate content."
Seems the result should follow from (A) and (B). Malware scanners certainly filter, screen, and allow or disallow content.
I guess I will have to spend some time this weekend going over the decision and re-reading the statute. Thanks for the citation.
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.