« Translation Wars | Main | Itsy Bitsy Spider »
August 10, 2005
If they say it's legal
I complaint with my email provider gmx about an advertising they have in the webmail area:
It's for a company called UseNeXT, that offers usenet access. Basically they let you download all the illegal software, music and videos other people have posted in the newsgroups. Gmx hat accompanied the ad by a big feature text endorsing the company. So far I've only seen ads for this on torrent-sites, but now on the gmx site, owned by the big German United Internet and they claimed that the downloads via UseNeXT are totally legal.
Now they even took the time to write back to my complaint and really tried to justify the validity of their claims. Unfortunately the text and link stating again how great and legal UseNeXT is, was from shortnews a German news community, known for their obscure user contributed news. But it wasn't even posted by one of their users:
The link they sent me was in turn a feature article from shortnews just there to make more people sign up for UseNeXT.
It looks like they have a pretty profitable affiliate-program (65 EUR/lead)... But it's still not legal in my eyes, just because nobody went after the usenet for copyright-infringement, yet.
Posted by marco at August 10, 2005 9:11 AM in Category