Windows Genuine Advantage case dismissed
Microsoft has prevailed in a long-running legal battle over its Windows Genuine Advantage program. A judge rejected claims that its distribution effectively constituted spyware.
WGA is a set of tools which validate whether or not a copy of Windows is legitimate. If it isn’t, the tools display warning messages designed to irritate the user into getting a legal copy.
The lawsuit came from the fact that Microsoft distributed the tools through the Windows Update service. The plaintiffs claimed doing so involved misleadingly billing the tools as a security update. They also complained that users were not made aware that the tools would send data back to Microsoft about their copy of Windows. In the beta edition of WGA this happened every day, though in the final edition this was relaxed to once per month.
There had been an application to make the case a class action suit, meaning anyone who could prove they were affected in the same way as the main plaintiffs could join the case automatically rather than bring their own case, and would benefit from any favorable judgment. That application was rejected last month.
As part of the agreement to dismiss the case, both sides have agreed to pay their own costs. That suggests the plaintiffs believed they might well lose and feared having to pay hefty lawyer fees for Microsoft.
The lawsuit failing shouldn’t come as a great surprise. Yes, from a legal and principled standpoint, Microsoft may have misled users in the way they distributed the tools. But in practice it’s hard to see how anyone suffered any genuine harm from Microsoft’s actions, particularly in financial terms.
There were some teething problems with the way Windows Genuine Advantage operated, which did cause disruption to those with legitimate copies. But that’s a screw-up in operation rather than an inherently wrong system.
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