US FTC actions The US Federal Trade Commission has sued Internet marketing organizations under the "unfairness doctrine"See Federal Trade Commission v. Sperry & Hutchinson Trading Stamp Co. to make them stop infecting consumers' PCs with spyware. In one case, that against Seismic Entertainment Productions, the FTC accused the defendants of developing a program that seized control of PCs nationwide, infected them with spyware and other malicious software, bombarded them with a barrage of pop-up advertising for Seismic's clients, exposed the PCs to security risks, and caused them to malfunction. Seismic then offered to sell the victims an "antispyware" program to fix the computers, and stop the popups and other problems that Seismic had caused. On November 21, 2006, a settlement was entered in federal court under which a $1.75 million judgment was imposed in one case and $1.86 million in another, but the defendants were insolvent FTC Permanently Halts Unlawful Spyware Operations (FTC press release with links to supporting documents); see also FTC cracks down on spyware and PC hijacking, but not true lies , Micro Law, IEEE MICRO (Jan.-Feb. 2005), also available at IEEE Xplore .
US FTC actions The US Federal Trade Commission has sued Internet marketing organizations under the "unfairness doctrine"See Federal Trade Commission v. Sperry & Hutchinson Trading Stamp Co. to make them stop infecting consumers' PCs with spyware. In one case, that against Seismic Entertainment Productions, the FTC accused the defendants of developing a program that seized control of PCs nationwide, infected them with spyware and other malicious software, bombarded them with a barrage of pop-up advertising for Seismic's clients, exposed the PCs to security risks, and caused them to malfunction. Seismic then offered to sell the victims an "antispyware" program to fix the computers, and stop the popups and other problems that Seismic had caused. On November 21, 2006, a settlement was entered in federal court under which a $1.75 million judgment was imposed in one case and $1.86 million in another, but the defendants were insolvent FTC Permanently Halts Unlawful Spyware Operations (FTC press release with links to supporting documents); see also FTC cracks down on spyware and PC hijacking, but not true lies , Micro Law, IEEE MICRO (Jan.-Feb. 2005), also available at IEEE Xplore .