On Mon, Apr 9, 2012 at 4:33 PM, floris v <[email protected]> wrote: > Hello, in the old oooforum.org forum this topic was posted: > http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.phtml?p=485494#485494 > > It appears that if you download and install OOo from > http://www.office-suite-download.com/ you also get the funmoods toolbar and > a lot of trouble. Can you take action against it? Thank you. >
I found more information from the user on this one. He found it when searching Bing for Open Office. If you try that you will see several fake sites, as paid advertisements. One site even claims to be the "official Open Office download" (http://www.open-office-download.net/) though their "premium installer" (showing a large OpenOffice.org logo) installs a bunch of other apps that inject themselves into your browser, etc. The business model is simple. They are paid per install to bundle these other apps, and they advertize their adulterated version of OpenOffice via email spam, social network spam, domain squatting and search engine advertisements. In general taking down the actual sites is difficult. Some of these, for example, are off-shore. So our best bet is to go after the weakest link, namely Bing. The search engines like Bing and Google generally have a policy against using 3rd party trademarks in ad text. Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc., have similar policies that could be used. So instead of trying to shut down the site, you simply prevent the sites from using the major search engines and social network sites to confuse users. However, to raise a complaint against these ads via Bing would require that we actually have the registered trademark in Apache's name, something we do not have now. But if we did we could take care of all of these sites in an afternoon. -Rob > Peter aka floris v >
