In the discussion about the best way to manage the Mozilla trademarks, the problem of sites charging people to download Firefox is often mentioned. However, not everyone has come across such a site. For your ediification, I present ‘A Tour Of A “Pay to Download Firefox” Site‘, with detailed analysis and screenshots.
You’ll be pleased to hear we have recently been having some success using trademark law with preliminary injunctions and domain name disputes against such sites.
“Such sites” are making you pay access to their repository, which happens to be where Firefox is stored, here. It sounds like rapidshare in its premium version or giganews giving unlimited NNTP access for a monthly fee.
I wonder how trademark law can be used against “such sites”.
glandium: as the write-up says, not always. They often redirect to the project’s own download servers for the download. They claim to be a “recommendation service”. And even if they did host it themselves, the amount of money is out of all proportion to the service offered.
I like how they consider three years to be a “lifetime”…
“There’s no mention of the “7-day money back policy” which you’ve seen touted on several of the screens so far.”
Wait wait, you people don’t have laws dictating a minimum length money back period?
The general law about the money back period in the UK for distance sales is 7 days, and if they don’t properly state about the customer’s cancellation rights (and the procedure for exercising those rights) then the period starts from when they give this information rather than from the date of delivery. But there is an exemption if what is paid for is a service rather than goods, and the customer has already started to have use of the service.
Incidentally, there is also an exemption for computer software on physical media that has been unsealed by the customer. This applies regardless of whether or not the customer would be in breach of licence conditions by retaining a copy, which I think is fair enough.
Sorry, should have said 7 working days.
Wow. Just, wow.
I’m trying to figure out who would pay that kind of money for software — any software, even something famously expensive like the Creative Suite — without comparison shopping to look for a slightly better deal from a different retailer. That’s just crazy.
But in this case we’re talking about something that the initial lead-in page advertises as free, and people still PAY these prices? Voluntarily? Talk about having more money than brains!
I must say too, any search engine that lists these sites on the first page of results is *completely* falling down on the job.
About bogus download firefox sites, I’m happy you seem to have succeeded in getting http://www.mozilla.fr shut down (which was clearly breaking the distribution rights by distributing a modified binary).
I hope mozilla europe can get back the domain name.
Yes, we did recover “mozilla.fr” for Mozilla, together with 3 typo domains that had been registered by same people.