Jed: “Hey, I know a great business model! Let’s profit from the hard work of others by selling what they are giving away for free!”
Ted: “Er, Jed, isn’t making money from people’s ignorance a bit unethical?”
Jed: “Unwhat, sorry?”
Ted: “Unethical.”
Jed: <looks concerned> “Ted, are you feeling OK?”
Ted: <shakes head> “Sorry, don’t know what came over me there. Let’s sign up for Google ads for the ‘firefox‘ keyword. That’ll be sure to bring the suckers in…”
Wow, they really go all out.
“This is a recurring charge, and may be canceled at any time.” (shaded message at checkout screen)
“Yes, I also want to backup my DVDs $9.95 (39.95 value)” (shaded checkbox, checked by default)
Check out the hilarious “testimonials” on the right hand side! :)
“I came for Internet Explorer, I left with 100’s of other programs. Thanks for putting everything in one place.
– Troy B.”
or this :
“Disclaimer: This website has no affiliation whatsoever with the owner of this software program, and provides ONLY a link to the software program.”
Bastards.
Mozilla Developer: Hey look, here is some assholes selling our work — for the exact same thing they could download for free from us!
Mozilla Developer #2: How horrible.
Mozilla Developer: I know what I’ll do! I’ll get all of the big bloggers for Mozilla to write and link to them! And condemn them to hell!
Mozilla Developer #2: Won’t that just increase their Google pagerank, thus increasing the chance that they’ll be seen as reputable in the Google search rankings?
Mozilla Developer: Who cares! We need to _condemn_ them to hell!
Just joking. But my point stands, I don’t think linking to them is a great idea.
Scary. Need to pay even for accessing Google…
could use rel=nofollow in the link so that google ignores the link for pagerank purposes.
They’re even selling access to Google ??? I think Ben can now place a phone call to the company shark^^^^^lawyer :-)
Oh come on… be nice to the name ‘Jed’ :D.
Yeah, it seem quite a few different companies are bootlegging off of Firefox in Google Ads and trying to make a profit.
Bastards.
Why doesn’t the mozilla group just enforce their copyrights? They definetly have the ability to do so (money obviously isn’t a problem). You can probably give google a heads-up on the problem first though.
imo, a great deal of the shame should go to google. they should simply refuse obvious fraude for their ads (it makes them valueless anyway). didnt they come up with a ‘not evil’ slogan or something? maybe its time to revise it.
There is an answer: licensing@mofo. I’ll drop them a line.
Barry: they aren’t breaking copyright law. They aren’t copying anything. They may be breaking trademark law, however – it’s a little hard to say. After all, they are using the name in a truthful sense to describe the service they are providing. Of course, IANAL.
alanjstr: I am licensing@mofo :-)