Kaspersky Lab, a leading developer of secure content management solutions, announces that the United States District Court of Washington ruled in favor of Kaspersky Lab, granting immunity from liability in the case brought by online media company Zango.

Zango sued Kaspersky Lab to force the Company to reclassify Zangos programs as nonthreatening and to prevent Kaspersky Labss security software from blocking Zangos potentially undesirable programs. In the important ruling for the anti-malware industry, Judge Coughenour of the Western District of Washington threw out Zangos lawsuit on the grounds that Kaspersky was immune from liability under the US Communications Decency Act, part of which states: No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected, or any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to [such] material.

The ruling protects consumer choice to determine what information and software is allowed on each computing system, and enables anti-malware vendors with the right to identify and label software programs that may be potentially unwanted and harmful to a users computer as they see fit. Kaspersky Labs software is designed to do just that. Users can adjust the settings to allow certain programs of their choice to come through at all times.

Kaspersky Labs mission is, and has always been, to make the Internet a safer place for all. We are thrilled with the outcome of this case because it supports the key message of the information security industry consumer protection comes first, says Eugene Kaspersky, CEO of Kaspersky Lab.

[This is an important ruling, not just for Kaspersky but for the anti-malware field as such. It will be interesting to see if any appeal emerges. Also, hopefully the industry will take this ruling as a signal to include more potentially undesirable software in their scope of detection, allowing users to decide for themselves what they will allow on their computers in terms of e.g. DRM protection products and other stealthy products, e.g. spy programs installed by government agencies. --Ed].

Related links: (Open in a new window.)
www.kaspersky.com
www.viruslist.com

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