Symantec wants to show that its characterization of adware is accurate (number one on your very sensible five-bullet-point list). For this purpose, it’s important both to establish what Symantec means when it uses the term (so we can then compare those behaviors to Hotbar’s actual behaviors) and what others mean when they use that term (to make sure Symantec’s use of the term isn’t somehow off-base).

I don’t know that we need any single definition of “adware” in order to address these questions, any more than we need any single definition of any other term in the language. There will always be multiple definitions, and that’s just fine; courts are used to figuring out whether a given definition is reasonable given typical usage elsewhere, etc.

Thanks to Eric Goldman’s exhaustive account of Symantec’s preemptive strike against Hotbar (“Is too adware”; “Is not”; “Is too”), I can tease out a point about the Brand X opinion that I found noteworthy even if a lot of people found it distrac…