This is the third in a series of blog posts (previous: 1, 2) on how Mozilla is using its trademarks to try and make sure everyone gets a genuine copy of our software, for free.

Mozilla has a form where people can report sites abusing our trademarks. And we are very grateful to people who do. Harvey Anderson, the Mozilla general counsel, has recently posted some statistics on what those sorts of reports have helped us achieve.

But we aren’t the only people trying to deal with the problem of “subscription trap” sites. downloados.de is a private initiative in Germany educating internet users about the typical set-up of a subscription trap. It comes across like a typical trap site, but when the user makes the final click to send off their personal details and to obtain the software, the website then informs them that they were about to spend money on free software and that they should be more careful next time.