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Yet Another Company Sues Over Being Called Adware
from the yet-again dept
We've seen a few such cases in the past -- and they usually end with a judge telling the suing company to shove off, but here we have yet another company upset that its being labeled as an adware/spyware provider. In this case, it's a company called 7Search, which is suing McAfee. 7Search is claiming that McAfee's warning about "downloads" from its site having been "credibly" called adware or spyware are false and defamatory because 7Search no longer offers software for download off its site (though it apparently did in the past).
As Eric Goldman notes in the link above, just bringing these types of lawsuits tends to backfire. As we noted above, they rarely, if ever, win, and simply filing the lawsuit draws much more attention to the company -- often including reports from users about why they do think the software in question is adware or spyware. In the meantime, if 7Search no longer offers downloads, then it's not clear what it's upset about either, since it's not like the McAfee warning is going to stop people from downloading its software -- since, apparently, there's no software to download.
Reader Comments
(Flattened / Threaded)
No but...
The McAfee warning is likely to discourage people from visiting *at all* and if the problem has gone away and McAfee won't fix the warning - what do you suggest they do?
On the face of it it would seem to be defamatory - assuming they have attempted to work with McAfee first (big assumption).
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Adware
Hey, if you can't make money legitimately, sue your way to fortune.
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unknown
so they get McAfee to drop the warning so people go to their site that "doesn't have anything to download" and then months later they put the download back up, spyware included free of charge of course.
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If It Starts
If It starts out as a gator. it's still a gator.
Outfits like this never become beneficent.
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Thanks for the heads-up, Ms. Streisand
*adds 7Search to list of blocked domains*
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Downloads, spyware and speculation
If there were a means to identify users among friendly servers (something perhaps like an IP address)
If through forms, validation by IPs, cookies left on the computer (for any amount of time), a profile could be approached
It could actually be tested by continuing to track while trying to predict. At the point you can predict, you know the wants of the prospective user.
Better than all that, where (as Aasimov I think was the first to point out, although I won't swear to it)
oh where does the morality lie?
--Glenn
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Crapware
If i was McAfee I'd stop calling it adware -- and call it crapware instead.
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Adware
Yet another company that thinks it has the right to put things on our computers with-out permission or telling us, and thinks it has the right to look at where we are surfing.
I don't think so!
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Mcafee
SiteAdvisor is really worthless - they allow every idiot to write whatever he wants and "review" products that are often great products.
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