For many years, we've written some highly critical reports about Spyware vendors, some of whom would then e-mail us asking us to stop referring to their product as Spyware. Claria Corporation was perhaps the worst offender in this regard, threatening to sue anyone (AV Vendors or the press) who called their Gator spyware what it actually was.

It has all been part of a massive attempt by the spyware industry to hoist some kind of pseudo-legitimacy on a sector that spent almost a decade trampling user rights and privacy. As part of this push, Zango (formerly 180Solutions) recently sued Kaspersky over using the Spyware tag, but a court has dismissed the lawsuit:Specifically, the court ruled that AV companies are protected under statute 47 USC 230(c)(2), which defines the AV vendor as an interactive computer service provider and immune to such semantic lawsuits by the spy-infectious-disease-spew-ware industry.