Blog Entry #1

Greetings, CIS Blog visitors.  I’m Lisa, a third-year law student who recently joined Jennifer’s Cyberlaw Clinic.   I am part of a team of four students working on a semester-long investigation of unfair business practices in the spyware/adware industry, which we hope will culminate in the filing of a complaint against several companies with particularly egregious products and contractual terms.  Thus far, we have researched many of the potential claims which we can make against these spyware companies, and to buttress our claims we are working alongside technical experts from Stanford’s Computer Science department.  Now that spam is a commonplace term known for being more than just canned mystery meat, spyware appears to be the next big battle which will be waged to make the World Wide Web a kinder, gentler, and smaller world after all.  (cue that darned Disney music)  In the last couple years alone, both California and Utah passed anti-spyware bills (much respect to the Governator), the House passed two anti-spyware bills (H.R 2929 and H.R. 4661) which are awaiting Senate approval, lawsuits by product users against spyware companies 180Solutions and DirectRevenue have been filed in the Northern District of Illinois, and Elliot Spitzer sued, then settled with spyware distributor Intermix to the tune of $7.5 million.