14 DAY TRIAL // CyberSpy Software, LLC, has been allowed to resume sales of their RemoteSpy product after the judge decided to dissolve the preliminary injunction, originally requested by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The company argued in court that its license agreement prohibited the use of the software for illegal purposes, and agreed to send this message more clearly to its customers.
RemoteSpy is what its developers call a surveillance tool that is able to run hidden on a computer and record browsing history, e-mails, instant messaging conversations and keystrokes. The program sends the data gathered to the company's servers, where it is stored and made available for the customers to see.
The Federal Trade Commission filed a complaint (PDF file) against CyberSpy Software at the beginning of November for violating the fair trade law, because according to it the “defendants' actions cause, or are likely to cause substantial injury to consumers that cannot be reasonably avoided, and is not outweighed by countervailing benefits to consumers or competition.”
After weighting the privacy and security concerns in regard to CyberSpy's practices, like providing its customers with “instructions on how to disguise the software as an innocuous file, such as 'photos' or 'music' attached to an email, in order to send the software to another computer,” the judge agreed to a preliminary injunction.
On the 24th of November, during the injunction hearing, the company centered its defense around the argument that the software did not break any laws and that the only difference was in how people decided to use it. “The approach taken by the FTC would render all remote computer monitoring software illegal because they don’t really distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate uses of the software,” noted Tracer Spence, the company's CEO, on his blog.
In a press release, CyberSpy Software revealed that several of its customers testified in court regarding the benefits of the product and how it helped their family life or business, by allowing them to monitor their children or employees. “Computer monitoring software is just like any other surveillance technology: There is nothing inherently illegal about binoculars, hidden cameras, or directional microphones, for example, but people can use those tools to break the law," argued Mr. Spence.
The company's General Counsel, Clegg Ivey, made an analogy between this case and a case that he previously won, where the Recording Industry “asked a court to ban MP3 players as being useful only for music piracy.” He noted that “the Recording Industry was wrong then just like the FTC is wrong now.”