Thursday, February 27, 2003

Intuit sued in TurboTax flap The bad news just keeps on coming for Intuit, who botched what was a bad idea in the first place. Now a Los Angeles attorney has filed a class-action suit against the company for "misleading consumers about controversial antipiracy technology in its current TurboTax software." The suit alleges Intuit engaged in unfair and deceptive business practices by failing to fully disclose the mechanisms and consequences of "product activation," technology Intuit added to TurboTax to tie each copy of the software to a single PC. Widespread customer complaints about the product activation, enabled by Macrovision's SafeCast software, have ranged from concerns that SafeCast surreptitiously stores information on hidden areas of a PC's hard disk to difficulties getting TurboTax to work again if the owner switches hard drives or PCs. Apparently, the attorney filing the suit had experienced firsthand the problems many customer have reported. Leviant said the suit was prompted by numerous complaints he heard from friends and in media accounts and his own experiences using TurboTax this year. "I changed computers--I had a screen go out on a laptop just after installing TurboTax," he said. "I went through all the things people have described in trying to get the program reactivated on a new computer." 3:15:50 PM    Oh yeah? []