James Delahunty
9 Sep 2009 0:06
Microsoft Corp. has been hit with another lawsuit over the Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) software that is used as an anti-piracy tool for Windows XP. The latest lawsuit - filed in a Washington district court - also makes claims of false advertising and privacy law violations. The false advertising possibly refers to how the WGA tools are offered as security updates and not anti-piracy tools.
Mirroring past lawsuits, the complaint also addresses how WGA phones home to Microsoft on a daily basis with IP addresses and other private information of users. This combined with an alleged difficulty in removing WGA from a system leads the complaint to suggest that it acts no different than spyware.
Two lawsuits filed in 2006 over the same issues have not amounted to any decisions yet, and since then Microsoft has extended modified versions of WGA to Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Microsoft Office. Online validation is generally required to download updates for the products from Microsoft's servers.
It has also come under fire in the past for having allegedly high levels of false positives, where genuine copies of Windows XP were flagged as counterfeit. If that should happen to you, then maybe this tool will help.