The Problems With EULA Viruses
from the sneaky-sneaky dept
Last month we had an article about a company that was sneakily passing around a "legal" virus by getting people to view electronic greeting cards which required people to download the virus software - including a sneaky end user license agreement that told the users what the program would do (send copies of itself to everyone in your addressbook). Here's an article looking at this idea and wondering what the implications of such "agreed to" viruses are. It seems that some bad marketing types have seized on the fact that no one actually reads the EULA and they're using that to sneak through all sorts of stuff that people probably don't want. It started with spyware and adware in products like Kazaa and Gator, but now that it's moving on to real viruses, people are wondering what to do about this practice. With a normal virus, whoever creates it can be arrested - but in this case, the creator is (somewhat) out in the open, and claiming that he's done everything legally. While courts have said that click-through agreements are legal, situations like these viruses may make them reconsider.
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