Thanks for your feedback folks, many of you have raised some good
points. I have given some more thought to this issue and would like
to share my conclusions: My company can't allow download sites to
make their own postings of our software. Your situation may vary of
course, but this is my 2 cents as to why:
1) A software developer) has no control over the errors and omissions
the listing editors make, as well as keeping current with the latest
version of their software. As Björn has mentioned, he's dealt with
customers who's expectations were misled by the listing site.
2) There is often no easy/good way to update or correct the listings.
When that option is present, it requires registration with the
software site and then the developer is playing on their terms.
3) They take text & graphics content from the developer's site
without permission... (IANAL, but I believe that is copyright
infringement in the US.)
4) ...Which also ends up giving the illusion that the product has
been posted by the software developers themselves -- something that
is false and misleading.
5) They profit off the developer's software by selling advertising --
not an evil thing in and of itself -- but it's done without the
developer's permission. If that developer *chooses* to upload their
software, then I think they have implicitly given their permission
for the listing site to profit from advertising.
6) The software developer can't vouch for the ethics of the listing
site -- i.e., they could also be posting pages of warez or the
advertising they show could involve pop-ups or unseemly ad content.
Through no fault of the software developer, potential users could
distrust the developer by mere association with these shady download
sites.
Some software download sites will not even tell the developer that
they are posting their software, so it is unknown how many times the
above problems are multiplied.
Now, knowing we can't stop them from posting a listing of our
software, we have put the following easy-to-implement measures in place:
1) For the listing sites that kindly inform us they posted our
software (or by giving it a bogus "award" for being virus free), we
ask them to remove the listing. Our form letter to the editors of the
software site clearly explain our justifications.
2) To encourage compliance with the above request, we inform them
that download links originating from their site are currently being
redirected to the official download page on VersionTracker or
MacUpdate (and hopefully to their competitor).
3) For sites that we don't know are posting listings of our software,
we redirect those download links to our product's home page.
Optionally, an occasional check of the referrers log may reveal new
download sites which could be added to the blacklist above.
4) In the future, we might consider redirecting the unauthorized
download link to an interim page that: Apologetically informs the
downloader they will need to click on the file link again, briefly
explains why, and then thanks the downloader for their understanding.
Finally, this all came about because the software we recently
released is MwRB -- making the topic a bit more germane to this
mailing list, I hope. :)
John Balestrieri
Tinrocket, LLC
www.tinrocket.com
On Aug 14, 2006, at 11:47 AM, John Balestrieri wrote:
Hi Folks,
I released some free software this weekend and uploaded it to
VersionTracker & MacUpdate. This morning, I received two emails,
one from "Softtonic" and the other from "Softpedia" -- they are
download sites (one is European) and both added my software to
their archives and grabbed some images off my software webpage and
stamped their logo on it.
Just a question for those who've been down this road before: Is
this normal or standard practice? Are these sites reputable? ie.,
I'm OK with VersionTracker and MacUpdate, which is why I chose to
post there, but if I only uploaded my software to one and not the
other, would VersionTracker or MacUpdate have automatically grabbed
my software listing from the other?
I've never uploaded anything to VersionTracker or MacUpdate before,
so I've not had to deal with this. My impulse is to have them pull
it down immediately, since I've no control over updating new
versions, etc.
John
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