According to a report prepared by Harvard Law student Benjamin Edelman, if you use Gator, now owned by Claria, you may be in a bit of a bind if you want to remove the GAIN (Gator Advertising Information Network) adware that has been installed on your computer by the Gator software.

According to Claria itself, more than 35 million users have the GAIN adware installed on their systems, although PC Pitstop says that only a very small minority of those 35 million actually knowingly agreed to the adware being installed.

However, the End User Licensing Agreement (EULA), which you would have signed when downloading and installing Gator, says, buried way towards the bottom, that you agree that “you will not use, or encourage others to use, any unauthorized means for the removal of the GAIN Adserver, or any GAIN-supported software from a computer.”

Following a proffered link takes the user to a section where one can learn the authorized means for removing the adware: “If you decide you don’t want GAIN-Supported Software, you can easily remove it through the Add/Remove Programs menu in your Microsoft Windows control panel.”

In other words, the only authorized method for removing the GAIN adware installed by Gator is through the Windows Add/Remove Programs interface.

The problem with this, according to Edelman, is that… [Continued]