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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."
Poor guy, that Coughenator...his lungs must be shot.
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
Kaspersky Labs is a Russian concern, a really nice AV product. :P
Eugene Kaspersky is a fantastic programmer and has always
had his hand in the business of stopping those sneaky bastards
who send us viruses and trojans and malware.
"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.
And god damn zango!
I mean that in the nicest possible way, of course.
Oh, and god damn their lawyers too.
They have offices in the US, from which they sell their software to US customers.
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!
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.
``Of course. Russia is part of the US judicial system.''
As we _should_ all know, really. I mean, otherwise arresting Dmitry Sklyarov would have been out of bounds. And we all know that wasn't the case; to say otherwise would be blasphemy. You can't violate the DMCA in Russia and walk free!
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Let's see now, too fast through the pentameter, failing to stop at an enjambment, yup, I'm going to need to see your poetic licence, son.
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?"