15 ms·

Companies that make money by distributing misleading versions of VLC

248 points by etix 15y ago

zenspunk 15y ago
Should Google somehow run background checks on every advertiser to see if they're breaking some US law? (or other countries' laws?) What broken laws should justify removal? 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.
- jbk 15y ago
  No, but at least Google should take down those advertisers when they are reported to them. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2738238 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2738238 as a comment, for example.
  - zenspunk 15y ago
    Edit: parent made a retrospective edit to add the link after I had made this post. 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.
    - jbk 15y ago
      > is Google meant to run a background check on each and every report? 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.
      - zenspunk 15y ago
        >Yes. They get money from advertisement, they should check reports. 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.
        georgemcbay 15y ago
        > Drug companies get money from selling ingredients for makeshift heroin, they should stop its use? 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.
- msy 15y ago
  Fake anti-virus software, counterfeit pharmacies, counterfeit products in general, malware of all sorts. Google have been taking their money for years. They have the resources not to. That's pretty shitty behaviour that endangers their users in my book.
  - zenspunk 15y ago
    >They have the resources not to. This point is crucial. Could you elaborate?
    - Empedocles99 15y ago
      Google has billions in cash sitting around, I'm sure if they hired a few thousand people to deal with this problem that some significant strides could be made. This, however, may not be the most prudent use of resources (cash).
- numbsafari 15y ago
  Google wants to be a useful search engine that returns relevant results. If they are returning links to malware/spyware/adware in exchange for money rather than linking to legitimate results, don't you think that is not only unethical but borderline illegal? 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.
  - zenspunk 15y ago
    Did you not read my post? I said they could easily (relatively) solve the issue of these guys turning up in search results. 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!
    - jbk 15y ago
      We speak here about US law, not arbitrary country, because that where Google is based. They can solve the problem of checking reports on US copyright violations with Adwords.
      - zenspunk 15y ago
        Google also does business and has employees and servers in many other countries. Why should they not enforce the laws of those countries too?
        jbk 15y ago
        Google refuses to comply to some French law about logs retention because their servers are not in France. Why would it be otherwise in the opposite situation?
    - numbsafari 15y ago
      Here's google's policy on copyright violations in AdWords: https://adwords.google.com/support/select/professionals/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=13347 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.
- JoeAltmaier 15y ago
  Not taking people's money doesn't get you sued. Amazon's scam-bots cancel legitimate vendors all the time because they 'smell funny'. 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.
darklajid 15y ago
I wonder if there are any SEO people out there, doing pro-bono (is that even the right term?) work for open source projects like this? It should be possible to fight back (or, as was discussed/suggested before, search engines are just broken).
- ludwigvan 15y ago
  I doubt it would be welcome, see http://jacobian.org/writing/seo-scumbags/ http://jacobian.org/writing/seo-scumbags/ "Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."
  - nbpoole 15y ago
    The difference there is "I want a link back from your site to my site." That's the point at which the offer loses all possible shreds of credibility.
  - jasonlotito 15y ago
    That's not SEO. That's spam. SEO is about optimizing portions of your website for people using a search engine. Lumping all SEO together is akin to lumping all hackers together as criminals. I equate the techniques to those used in journalism. You want to front load the article with the most important information. The least important information should be at the end.
    - rhizome 15y ago
      ...or lumping hackers and crackers together as "all hackers."
      - jasonlotito 15y ago
        Congratulations! I knew someone was going to call me out on that when I wrote it. Much easier to make pointless observations than to actually contribute, after all.
- 15y ago
mwill 15y ago
Worth noting it seems many of the sites listed at the end of the post are now offline.
- jbk 15y ago
  It seems the OP was updated with a better list...
TeMPOraL 15y ago
Seeing that I am thinking more and more about creating a personal "never ever work with those people/companies" database...
jbk 15y ago
Disclaimer: VLC dev and VideoLAN chairman 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/ http://vlc-download.com/ on the first page of "VLC" search makes me wondering...
- rw 15y ago
  How likely is it that these sites serve up clean binaries to Google's spider?
  - jbk 15y ago
    Quite unlikely, tested with different user-agent, and notably the Google Spider one, but the binaries are almost empty and download other binaries, which might not work for them... Another explanation is that Google doesn't consider those adware and toolbar as malware... I truly don't know.
    - 18pfsmt 15y ago
      Perhaps one or some of the tech press that read HN will pick this story up and give you all some more link juice? Or, perhaps some of those anonymous vigilantes will be happy to have new targets to go after. 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.
    - peteretep 15y ago
      My knowledge is probably ~ 7 years out of date here, but back in the day when I worked in AV, labelling and removing spyware was a task fraught with legal issues. 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.
billpg 15y ago
So distributing copy of VLC with lots of malware added but still conforming with the GPL is okay?
- jbk 15y ago
  Yes, this is ok, as long as VLC copyright is concerned. 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.
  - billpg 15y ago
    I think the trademark would stop my hypothetical evil plans more than anything else. If I had to call it "Bill's video player that isn't evil, honest." no-one would download it. (To say nothing of why someone who distributes malware would be at all concerned with copyright and trademark law.)
  - omouse 15y ago
    Which of those would be okay in a copyright-less world? Which ones are morally/ethically bad (without copyright law)?
    - jbk 15y ago
      If no copyright exists, then you can do all of the above. If no trademark exists, only the trademark one would be ok. If no patents exists, no change. Ethically, I would say that the biggest issue is to claim money for a work you haven't done.
    - scott_s 15y ago
      GPL enforcement depends on copyright law. So, all GPL enforcement goes out the window without copyright law. 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.
jaehoony 15y ago
well, people shouldn't be using crap like VLC in the first place.
- pavel_lishin 15y ago
  Why do you consider VLC crap, and what would you suggest as an alternative? Bonus points if the alternative works on all three operating systems that I use (OS X, Windows XP, Ubuntu.)
  - DarkShikari 15y ago
    There are only ~two decent alternatives: mplayer (and GUIs such as mplayer-osx, smplayer, etc) MPC-HC (windows-only)
    - rimmjob 15y ago
      i use mplayer with smplayer and it is amazing. I couldn't watch high res HD on any of my computers with VLC and now i can run it on my old, shitty netbook. I've also heard good things about potplayer but i've never used.
      - jbk 15y ago
        enable GPU decoding on the netbook in VLC.
omouse 15y ago
How can you say "intellectual" property and GPL in the same sentence? That's fucked up, seriously. The whole point of the GPL is to help erode the copyright system and make it unnecessary. 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.
- jbk 15y ago
  > How can you say "intellectual" property and GPL in the same sentence? That's fucked up, seriously. 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?
troymc 15y ago
Last week, I changed my default search in Chrome to DuckDuckGo. Today when I do a search for VLC Media Player I get the "VLC media player" Wikipedia article in the red box at top, and http://www.videolan.org/vlc http://www.videolan.org/vlc as the top search result, with a nice little "Official site" label beside it. I'm increasingly delighted by DuckDuckGo.
MetaMan 15y ago
I think the real issue is that there is a misalignment of "business models". 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.
arihant 15y ago
To me it appears that most have not changed the name and they are hosting the download files for free. Not all darkness here.
Zeus-TheTrueGod 15y ago
sudo apt-get install vlc. Really easy, so may be google is not the best way to download and install software ?
- rwmj 15y ago
  Obviously this is the best way to get it. 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.
rwmj 15y ago
One problem with VLC is the genuine site's URL is not obvious. It is: http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ 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.
shadowflit 15y ago
So of course I agree that spam results are the heart of evil. But I'm confused. After reading the DDG comment, I plugged both "VLC" and "VLC Media Player" into both google and DDG, expecting to see bad results at google. Instead, the top 4 results (ignoring ads, of course) all point to videolan.org. Is this a case of my results being pre-filtered or something? I don't recall hitting the "this is stupid, make it go away" button too often on Google.

248 points by etix 15y ago

Should Google somehow run background checks on every advertiser to see if they're breaking some US law? (or other countries' laws?) What broken laws should justify removal? 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.

jbk 15y ago
No, but at least Google should take down those advertisers when they are reported to them. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2738238 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2738238 as a comment, for example.
- zenspunk 15y ago
  Edit: parent made a retrospective edit to add the link after I had made this post. 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.
  - jbk 15y ago
    > is Google meant to run a background check on each and every report? 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.
    - zenspunk 15y ago
      >Yes. They get money from advertisement, they should check reports. 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.
      - georgemcbay 15y ago
        > Drug companies get money from selling ingredients for makeshift heroin, they should stop its use? 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.
msy 15y ago
Fake anti-virus software, counterfeit pharmacies, counterfeit products in general, malware of all sorts. Google have been taking their money for years. They have the resources not to. That's pretty shitty behaviour that endangers their users in my book.
- zenspunk 15y ago
  >They have the resources not to. This point is crucial. Could you elaborate?
  - Empedocles99 15y ago
    Google has billions in cash sitting around, I'm sure if they hired a few thousand people to deal with this problem that some significant strides could be made. This, however, may not be the most prudent use of resources (cash).
numbsafari 15y ago
Google wants to be a useful search engine that returns relevant results. If they are returning links to malware/spyware/adware in exchange for money rather than linking to legitimate results, don't you think that is not only unethical but borderline illegal? 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.
- zenspunk 15y ago
  Did you not read my post? I said they could easily (relatively) solve the issue of these guys turning up in search results. 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!
  - jbk 15y ago
    We speak here about US law, not arbitrary country, because that where Google is based. They can solve the problem of checking reports on US copyright violations with Adwords.
    - zenspunk 15y ago
      Google also does business and has employees and servers in many other countries. Why should they not enforce the laws of those countries too?
      - jbk 15y ago
        Google refuses to comply to some French law about logs retention because their servers are not in France. Why would it be otherwise in the opposite situation?
  - numbsafari 15y ago
    Here's google's policy on copyright violations in AdWords: https://adwords.google.com/support/select/professionals/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=13347 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.
JoeAltmaier 15y ago
Not taking people's money doesn't get you sued. Amazon's scam-bots cancel legitimate vendors all the time because they 'smell funny'. 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.

darklajid 15y ago

I wonder if there are any SEO people out there, doing pro-bono (is that even the right term?) work for open source projects like this? It should be possible to fight back (or, as was discussed/suggested before, search engines are just broken).

ludwigvan 15y ago
I doubt it would be welcome, see http://jacobian.org/writing/seo-scumbags/ http://jacobian.org/writing/seo-scumbags/ "Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."
- nbpoole 15y ago
  The difference there is "I want a link back from your site to my site." That's the point at which the offer loses all possible shreds of credibility.
- jasonlotito 15y ago
  That's not SEO. That's spam. SEO is about optimizing portions of your website for people using a search engine. Lumping all SEO together is akin to lumping all hackers together as criminals. I equate the techniques to those used in journalism. You want to front load the article with the most important information. The least important information should be at the end.
  - rhizome 15y ago
    ...or lumping hackers and crackers together as "all hackers."
    - jasonlotito 15y ago
      Congratulations! I knew someone was going to call me out on that when I wrote it. Much easier to make pointless observations than to actually contribute, after all.
15y ago

mwill 15y ago

Worth noting it seems many of the sites listed at the end of the post are now offline.

jbk 15y ago
It seems the OP was updated with a better list...

TeMPOraL 15y ago

Seeing that I am thinking more and more about creating a personal "never ever work with those people/companies" database...

jbk 15y ago

Disclaimer: VLC dev and VideoLAN chairman 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/ http://vlc-download.com/ on the first page of "VLC" search makes me wondering...

rw 15y ago
How likely is it that these sites serve up clean binaries to Google's spider?
- jbk 15y ago
  Quite unlikely, tested with different user-agent, and notably the Google Spider one, but the binaries are almost empty and download other binaries, which might not work for them... Another explanation is that Google doesn't consider those adware and toolbar as malware... I truly don't know.
  - 18pfsmt 15y ago
    Perhaps one or some of the tech press that read HN will pick this story up and give you all some more link juice? Or, perhaps some of those anonymous vigilantes will be happy to have new targets to go after. 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.
  - peteretep 15y ago
    My knowledge is probably ~ 7 years out of date here, but back in the day when I worked in AV, labelling and removing spyware was a task fraught with legal issues. 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.

billpg 15y ago

So distributing copy of VLC with lots of malware added but still conforming with the GPL is okay?

jbk 15y ago
Yes, this is ok, as long as VLC copyright is concerned. 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.
- billpg 15y ago
  I think the trademark would stop my hypothetical evil plans more than anything else. If I had to call it "Bill's video player that isn't evil, honest." no-one would download it. (To say nothing of why someone who distributes malware would be at all concerned with copyright and trademark law.)
- omouse 15y ago
  Which of those would be okay in a copyright-less world? Which ones are morally/ethically bad (without copyright law)?
  - jbk 15y ago
    If no copyright exists, then you can do all of the above. If no trademark exists, only the trademark one would be ok. If no patents exists, no change. Ethically, I would say that the biggest issue is to claim money for a work you haven't done.
  - scott_s 15y ago
    GPL enforcement depends on copyright law. So, all GPL enforcement goes out the window without copyright law. 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.

jaehoony 15y ago

well, people shouldn't be using crap like VLC in the first place.

pavel_lishin 15y ago
Why do you consider VLC crap, and what would you suggest as an alternative? Bonus points if the alternative works on all three operating systems that I use (OS X, Windows XP, Ubuntu.)
- DarkShikari 15y ago
  There are only ~two decent alternatives: mplayer (and GUIs such as mplayer-osx, smplayer, etc) MPC-HC (windows-only)
  - rimmjob 15y ago
    i use mplayer with smplayer and it is amazing. I couldn't watch high res HD on any of my computers with VLC and now i can run it on my old, shitty netbook. I've also heard good things about potplayer but i've never used.
    - jbk 15y ago
      enable GPU decoding on the netbook in VLC.

omouse 15y ago

How can you say "intellectual" property and GPL in the same sentence? That's fucked up, seriously. The whole point of the GPL is to help erode the copyright system and make it unnecessary. 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.

jbk 15y ago
> How can you say "intellectual" property and GPL in the same sentence? That's fucked up, seriously. 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?

troymc 15y ago

Last week, I changed my default search in Chrome to DuckDuckGo. Today when I do a search for VLC Media Player I get the "VLC media player" Wikipedia article in the red box at top, and http://www.videolan.org/vlc http://www.videolan.org/vlc as the top search result, with a nice little "Official site" label beside it. I'm increasingly delighted by DuckDuckGo.

MetaMan 15y ago

I think the real issue is that there is a misalignment of "business models". 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.

arihant 15y ago

To me it appears that most have not changed the name and they are hosting the download files for free. Not all darkness here.

Zeus-TheTrueGod 15y ago

sudo apt-get install vlc. Really easy, so may be google is not the best way to download and install software ?

rwmj 15y ago
Obviously this is the best way to get it. 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.

rwmj 15y ago

One problem with VLC is the genuine site's URL is not obvious. It is: http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ 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.

shadowflit 15y ago

So of course I agree that spam results are the heart of evil. But I'm confused. After reading the DDG comment, I plugged both "VLC" and "VLC Media Player" into both google and DDG, expecting to see bad results at google. Instead, the top 4 results (ignoring ads, of course) all point to videolan.org. Is this a case of my results being pre-filtered or something? I don't recall hitting the "this is stupid, make it go away" button too often on Google.