Closed Bug 1030990 Opened 10 years ago Closed 10 years ago

Swing a huge hammer at people advertise nasty versions of firefox.

Categories

(Marketing :: Trademark Violations, task)

x86
macOS
task
Not set
normal

Tracking

(Not tracked)

RESOLVED FIXED

People

(Reporter: glind, Assigned: liz)

Details

(Whiteboard: Information provided)

Attachments

(2 files)

Search for "Firefox" and AdWord ads have third-party builds of Firefox.  

Do we have recourse for this?  Or estimates of size of problem?  

(noted by Bill)
I found these instances on both bing and google.
ez-download is tracked in bug 839307.
Assignee: nobody → liz
Group: mozilla-employee-confidential
Component: Search → Trademark Violations
Flags: needinfo?(liz)
Product: Firefox → Marketing
Thanks for raising this concern. It is being worked on from a few different angles. 

In some cases, like the Yahoo example, we have an agreement with a company that allows them to distribute a slightly modified version of Firefox with Firefox (and their) branding. Our distribution agreements with Yahoo and others don't prohibit them from advertising their version of Firefox to a general audience. If they aren't complying with the distribution agreement our BD team reaches out.

With respect to working with Google and other search engines on having them not accept these ads, we haven't had much success to date, but are going to intensify our efforts.

In some cases, we've contacted the company distributing a version of Firefox that is bundled with other software. We've had mixed success. It is often difficult to find out who is behind the distribution.

There are also technical solutions in the works. The AMO team is working on requiring that add-ons be signed by Mozilla and the Firefox team is working on a mechanism to prevent changes to settings not made by the user.

As progress is made, information will be shared in a broader forum than this bug, so I'm closing it.
Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 10 years ago
Flags: needinfo?(liz)
Resolution: --- → FIXED
Whiteboard: Information provided
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