Mozilla Marketing
Neighborhood Watch
There are a number of websites and blogs that do a great job spreading the word about the Mozilla project. Some offer links to Mozilla news and information, some display Mozilla art, and some offer links to download Firefox. However, there are a small subset of people out there who aren’t playing nice, requiring personal information or in some cases even charging users a fee in order to download Firefox.
Many of these misleading websites are using Firefox trademarks through paid search advertising in order to acquire leads. With Ken’s help, we recently took a look at the potential damage to a user’s experience as a result of these advertisers. Based on website data provided by Alexa and our own search marketing click-thru rates for branded terms (e.g. “Mozilla Firefox”), we determined that as many as 7 million annual clicks are potentially being diverted to misleading websites. In other words, millions of people are having poor initial experiences with Firefox, or worse yet–paying for it financially.
A new form just launched on Mozilla.com that makes it easy to report Mozilla trademark abuse. Catherine, Harvey, and the Mozilla legal crew along with Alex and our Webdev team did a great job making it easy for anyone to report questionable behavior. As a community focused on keeping the web open and safe, it’s really important that we watch out for the bad guys together. So if you see something out there that looks fishy, please take a minute and fill out the form.
Discussion
9 comments for “Neighborhood Watch”
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Does this replace the “Trademark Violations” component in Bugzilla, or feed into it? Should the description of that component be updated to point people to this form?
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/describecomponents.cgi?product=Marketing
Please note that Google search results are different for each country and language, so if I will search Google for ‘Firefox’ I will get different results than you (Our local mozilla community website at top, while doesn’t exists at all in the English/US results). This mean that you should get people from different geographical places to search in order to get worldwide results.
Until mid-2008 Google was sponsoring Firefox using the Adsense referrer program which stopped in September. This made some websites which was actively suggesting Firefox (and doing SEO to their ‘download Firefox’ pages) to become dead links to get Firefox. They appear in results, but the user won’t find any download link on their sites. What can we do in order to make these sites to disappear from the results? While most of them are not charging money, they make the download experience worse.
Is there a list of licensed users of mozilla trademarks (i.e., licensees) somewhere online, or at least licensed users of “Firefox” and “Thunderbird”?
Seems like there should be some way to check and avoid dups or invalids before filing a violation.
For example, what about mobile versions of Firefox and Thunderbird distributed on USB drives? They are modified, and buyers pay for the drive on which they are delivered, so in some sense buyers are paying for them.
@ Jesse: Currently the report generated by the form goes to our legal crew, where it’s tracked on a system specifically designed to monitor infringing sites (outside bugzilla). We should add a link to the form in the description of the current bugzilla component you reference.
Could “SeaMonkey” be added to project listing; as Mozilla [legal] holds the trademark for SeaMonkey. And possibly some notice to seamonkey-council so that they can at least be aware of other sites where the downloads are offered?
I feel having it not an “Other” stepchild here would be good.
@Justin: Great idea. I’ve filed a bug to add both “SeaMonkey” and an “Other” to the product and trademark dropdowns as options. (It’s bug 484989 just in case you want to follow it).
I am a little bit confused.
The linked page says: “Please use this form to report any websites that are: (…) Distributing modified versions of Firefox, or any of our Mozilla software, and still using the trademark. Note: anyone may modify Mozilla software, but once modified, it may no longer use Mozilla trademark(s) (e.g., be called Firefox) without a license.”
On the other hand the EULA of Firefox 3 says: “3. PROPRIETARY RIGHTS. (…) You may not remove or alter any trademark, logo, copyright or other proprietary notice in or on the Product. (…)”
So, on the one hand you require modifications (like changing the name/logo etc.), but on the other hand you forbid these modifications! So, it seems that it is not possible at all to redistribute a modified version of Firefox (official build) without Mozilla’s explicit approval.
Is the above description correct?
@BartZilla-
The policy is that if you are distributing unchanged binaries of Firefox, and you are calling it Firefox, you may not remove or alter any trademark, logo, copyright or other proprietary notice in or on the Product.
However, if you are distributing a modified version of Firefox without a license from Mozilla, in addition to changing the name, you should also change the name of the executable so as to reduce the chance that a user of the modified software will be misled into believing it to be a native Mozilla product. Hope that answers the question.
@DR: Thanks for the reply.
Could you define “a modified version of Firefox”? It is possible (and relatively easy) to unpack Windows installer, change just few preferences (eg. in nonlocalized/defaults/pref/firefox.js), and pack it back. The binary files (i.e. executable, dll files etc.) are still completely unchanged. Is such installer distributable or not?