Companies that make money by distributing misleading versions of VLC
blog.l0cal.com
blog.l0cal.com
I think the worse part of all this mess is that Google refuses to act and stop those. This was requested quite a few time and Google told us to go away because we didn't own all the trademarks in the US (even though we still have copyright).
Moreover, the safe-browsing initiative, used in Chrome 12, is a complete joke. Reporting one of those websites make the safe-browsing re-scan the website, and find absolutely no issue with it and white-label it, which is even worse...
I contacted the Safe-Browsing initiative to report the issue and they told me "that their wasn't any issue on those websites...". Right...
Of course, running any of those executables on your Windows machine makes MSE (or other antivirus) scream...
I hope that Google fighting spam initiative will improve the situation, but seeing http://vlc-download.com/ on the first page of "VLC" search makes me wondering...
Another explanation is that Google doesn't consider those adware and toolbar as malware... I truly don't know.
I realize this is somewhat off-topic, but thanks for VLC and all that you all do. It's one of my favorite projects, and it's one of the first things I install on friends' machines.
AV companies could recognize and trivially remove such a thing - but chose not to, so they didn't get sued by well-monied corporations who got very upset at their "User Metric Software Toolbar blah blah blah" being marked as malware.
I wonder if that's the case here.
These engineers are /not/ the engineers that are in charge of designing or running the systems that sell ads. In fact, those are two completely different divisions of the company. (If you would like to learn more about how Google works from the inside, I suggest reading Steven Levy's book "In the Plex")
Just because you do not pay for something does not mean it is not a product. If search was not good, people would go to a competitor. This is how Google got to where it is today, and bing.com is just a click away. This thread is about the quality of Google search results, and your argument is that Google does not care about the quality of your search results because they allow you to use it free of charge by inserting labeled advertisements.
To me, this is not a logical argument -- your emotions and sense of being wronged have taken over.
So, from the perspective of a business analyst, you are saying that Google has no incentive to ensure the quality of their search results because they don't receive any additional money from the people who use it?
That sounds like very short-term thinking to me, and Google is a famously long-term thinking company.
OT your line of reasoning reminds me of Excite when they were considering using Google's results. "[Google] was too good. If Excite were to host a search engine that instantly gave people information they sought, [Excite's CEO] explained, the users would leave the site instantly." [1]
[1] http://cdixon.org/2011/05/16/accurate-contrarian-theories/
Look, I'm not saying this is good or bad. But it is what it is.
You don't pay them directly. Yes, they get paid based on your repeat usage, but they get paid by advertisers.
Your instinctual reaction to frame this in the context of a market is faulty. ALL of the major search players operate under the conceptual mode of users as product, advertisers as customers. The same is true with other media companies (TV, newspaper, etc). That seems to be the only model the market will currently bear, as the existence of media giants is predicated on their ability to accelerate consumption
I'm increasingly delighted by DuckDuckGo.
It should be possible to fight back (or, as was discussed/suggested before, search engines are just broken).
"Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."
http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/
Put in name of the bad guys. Find the blogs who blogged about their sites.
http://webylife.com/design/top-10-brand-logo-mistakes/commen...
http://www.dragonblogger.com/entertainment-television/
etc, etc. Contact them, ask them to change the link to the spam site with a link to your site.
It's stupid gruntwork, you'll need lots of it, and it will be like playing whackamole -- but it will probably work at getting them off the front page.
The other alternative, rather than de-ranking their sites, is to rank more of your own, or parasite off of high authority sites. For example, notice Wikipedia ranks for VLC right now? You know who else would rank for VLC with a trivial amount of effort? Github (&etc -- just has to be on any domain other than yours). Is there an OSS industry mag that you guys like? Have they written a review of it? Get your community to link to that review, with whatever anchor text you're having trouble with.
OSS projects shouldn't have really serious SEO issues for branded keywords -- you practically swim in link equity -- and wouldn't if marketing were treated as a priority worth addressing.
Still, adwords, adsense or bing ads get ranked over the highly ranked website.
The real issue is that the SEO guys are just too good and can poison the well with impunity. I feel only better competition can help this. Maybe the Bing guys can do a better job and eat Google's lunch. Quick search on Bing shows the first few links are legit but the last one isn't (and is identified as adware by our Sonicwall). Also, the ads Bing produces are fake too. Guess no one is doing a good job in this regard. I suspect shit like this is why PC users are clamoring for an "App Store." They need someone to help them properly install software.
but it's competing against (spammy) sites like "vlcdownload.org".
If they had vlc.com or changed their name to videolan, then it'd be better IMHO.
On the one hand you have an open Source project with little funding relying on a small group of volunteers acting mostly out of a sense of social responsibility and on the other hand you have dishonest rip-off artists able to make money for free with little or no practical sanction applied.
Its not really google's job to police the web (Note I'm not condoning Google's behaviour). The extent to which they do this depends on how well that policing activity aligns with their business interests.
The root problem is profit Vs non-profit in an environment with dis-interested / conflicted and or toothless regulatory bodies.
IMHO Money is metaphor for power and as long as VLC/VideoLAN is a 'not-for-profit' organisation they will have problems.
However:
- Claiming that you are the original Author is not OK, because of copyright laws.
- Adding restrictions on the usage of the software is not OK, because of the GPL.
- As the VLC installer is GPL, the modified installers must be GPL'd too.
- Shipping VLC commercially means shipping all the source code of all external libraries, which they usually don't. (Still GPL)
- VLC, VideoLAN, x264 and VLC media player Trademarks are registered. (depends on the countries)
- Scraping the website and the images is not ok. (copyright)
- Wrongly impersonating a person or an organisation is not ok either.
(To say nothing of why someone who distributes malware would be at all concerned with copyright and trademark law.)
Ethically, I would say that the biggest issue is to claim money for a work you haven't done.
I think everyone is already assuming that the above practices are morally and ethically bad. The problem is how to prevent them from happening, which most likely involves using the law.
Laws aren't natural, they're man-made things and they can be removed if they cause more problems than they solve.
Should this be before or after they allow them to advertise? If before, this would inconvenience the majority of advertisers who are legitimate. If after, should Google investigate every incoming report of illegitimate advertising? Or, how many reports should warrant an investigation by Google?
Regardless, can Google remove these Adword listings without legal issues (i.e. without risking being sued)?
Getting these scammers off the front page of search would be relatively easy - it can be solved algorithmically. They're probably working on it now, with their anti-linkspam initiative.
But I don't see how Google could get them off Adwords without employing hundreds or thousands of people to review advertisers, but this would create more problems of greater magnitude than it would solve.
They could crowdsource it to narrow the (retrospective) review process, but this would create a secondary market of advertising, which I doubt Google wants, nor users would want to deal with.
I can't think of a way for Google to solve this problem without creating larger ones.
It's the responsibility of governments -- not internet advertising platforms -- to police copyright law.
See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2738238 as a comment, for example.
So again, I ask:
- is Google meant to run a background check on each and every report?
- does this not put Google at risk of being sued by the removed advertiser?
- or, if Google wrongfully removes a legitimate advertiser, does this not put them at risk of being sued?
- which broken laws - of which country - should justify removal?
- how should they solve the potential problem of scammers flooding the report system?
Again, I don't think Google can solve this problem without creating larger ones. I don't think it's their job to police copyright.
Yes. They get money from advertisement, they should check reports.
> does this not put Google at risk of being sued by the removed advertiser?
No. If Google ToS banishes copyright infrigement, they can remove advertisers without questionning.
> or, if Google wrongfully removes a legitimate advertiser, does this not put them at risk of being sued?
Sued? This is inside Google system, respecting Google ToS. They have the right to banish accounts and have done repeatedly in the past.
> which broken laws - of which country - should justify removal?
CA, USA, of course.
> how should they solve the potential problem of scammers flooding the report system?
How do they solve spam on gmail?
> I don't think it's their job to police copyright.
I disagree on Adsense, but agree on Search. Making money from illegal activities is illegal in most (if not all ) countries.
I don't see how one implies the other. Drug companies get money from selling ingredients for makeshift heroin, they should stop its use?
> CA, USA, of course.
And which laws? Should they block advertisers of euthanasia? Political groups? "Terrorist" groups? This is a very slippery slope.
> How do they solve spam on gmail?
No, if I were to submit many reports with different advertisers from different accounts, there's no way to detect that as spam. There's no comparison with email spam, which is a one-to-many medium.
>I disagree on Adsense, but agree on Search. Making money from illegal activities is illegal in most (if not all ) countries.
Why the distinction between Adsense and Search? Do they not profit from Search?
Google isn't making money via copyright infringement - it's only a byproduct of the actions of separate perpetrators. It's like Microsoft being held responsible for botnets.
No, but if they receive credible reports that Joe Drugdealer is is using their ingredients to make makeshift heroin, they should look into those claims before directly selling their ingredients to Joe Drugdealer in the future. That's a more apt analogy to the situation we're discussing here.
If Google's product is US then they are effectively selling US to the malware/spyware/adware fiends.
Google absolutely has the responsibility to return relevant, meaningful and SAFE results to its users. They already try and do that in a lot of cases. It's just that, in this case, they are getting paid not to.
The problem they can't solve, I argue, is to ensure that people violating copyright law (of some arbitrary country) can't advertise with Adwords.
Edit: Look, I can do retrospective edits too!
They can solve the problem of checking reports on US copyright violations with Adwords.
https://adwords.google.com/support/select/professionals/bin/...
To quote:
"For AdWords and related programs such as Google AdWords Certification, if we receive a notice or otherwise have reason to believe that an advertiser's or client manager's site is infringing, we may remove the offender's advertising in compliance with the DMCA."
So, they already do this. The question is, whether or not the VLC team has submitted a complaint that meets their criteria.
My guess is that this is something the FSF should really get involved in, except they are probably too busy taking money from Google to talk up how "open" Android is to be bothered by a little pro-bono work from a hard-working group of OSS devs.
This point is crucial. Could you elaborate?
And nobody asked Google to background check - the offenders were reported, and Google whitewashed the report. That raises suspicious eyebrows because Google is making money off of the offenders.
But when I send some video to my friends/relatives and they can't play it, I have to say "use VLC". If I forget to send the URL, there's a danger they'll fall into some spam site.
Of course this situation is not specific to VLC, other open source products are affected by this scourge and there’s not much we can do about it. They have the money to buy adwords, we don’t. Sadly, as a non-profit organization we don’t have the money to sue them.
Really? You would sue them? That's kinda dumb don't you think? Kinda gives legitimacy to the shitty copyright system...
Anyway, my solution would be to ask for money so that you can afford to take some action.
The other half of this solution is to setup a few spammy/malware-looking websites that offer the genuine product. Out-spam the spammers! There must be a reason people are falling for the spammers' marketing after all.
And judging by the domain names, you failed to pick up on that marketing. They have some key domain names; downloadvlcplayer.net, vlcdownload.org, vlc-media-player-blog.com. Those domain names should have been bought up a while ago. Create a new domain, something like free-vlc-download.com.
You understand very little about GPL. GPL is very strongly linked to source code copyright and source code modification. It isn't BSD or MIT.
> I don't think it's tAnd judging by the domain names, you failed to pick up on that marketing. They have some key domain names; downloadvlcplayer.net, vlcdownload.org, vlc-media-player-blog.com. Those domain names should have been bought up a while ago.
With what money?