'WorldCAD Access' Aids Software Pirates!!!

Reader J.H. of Australia writes:

I realise that the ads which appear on your WorldCAD blog site are selected by some sort of robot which is provided by Google, and you presumably have little or no control over exactly what ads appear on your site, but does it worry you that prominent ads which are displayed on your web site direct people to (presumably) pirated downloads of AutoCAD, Microsoft Office, etc? Is there anything you can do to have such blatant pirate merchants removed from the list of linked ads? Is there anything Google can or should do to control this sort of linked advertising?

(When I go to the WorldCAD website today, the second ad from the top is headlined Get AutoCAD 2006 for $29. The link takes me to xg-soft.com which is offering AutoCAD, Office Pro, Acrobat etc for $29 each.)

I've noticed those ads, and have found they lead nowhere. As research for an article in upFront.eZine, I tried making purchases from these sites (usually located in Russia and eastern Europe) a half dozen times -- with no success. Either they link to other sites, or the purchasing process fails. Repeated emails to the sites' contacts resulted in no response. In short, they might be advertising pirated software, but you can't actually buy it.

(Why do the ads and sites exist, if they don't work? Could be part of a link exchange scam. Maybe someone smarter than me will figure it out.)

Google is now facing a law suit for promoting such sites in its searches. Perhaps that will make the world's largest non-evil corporation more carefully vet the content of the ads it provides to those of us who gratefully scrape the pennies off the pavement that it throws our way.

Unlike in the upFront.eZine e-newsletter, where each ad is known, I have no control over which ads appear to the right of this text, because they are served up randomly. Indeed, I rarely see them, because I am usually in the ad-free writing mode, and not the reading-my-own-work mode. (Believe it or not: I can't stand reading what I've written.)

I could halt Google ads, but then I wouldn't make any $$$ from writing this stuff -- and none of the people who made 509,633 page-views have ever contributed a donation.

PS: Speaking of heping pirates, an article in an upcoming issue of upFront.eZine describes how CAD vendors aid prirates: CAD vendors are concerned about about their software being pirated; are they as concerned when it's their software that does the pirating? Subscribe (it's free) by sending a 'subscribe upfront' message to editor @ upfrontezine.com ("Upcoming" means sometime in the next couple of weeks.)

Comments

[Miles Archer]

I didn't see an easy way to respond to your recent e-zine, so I'm replying here.

I started to check out View22's Cad-like offering with the kitchen design program, but stopped when it needed to download and install an Active-X control.

If you're installing a new control, you're no longer running as a browser. There have been a number of CAD-like programs that either have been, or could easily been made into controls. Such as Viso, Actrix, Volo View, etc. Some of these would have been a rather large download, but they would have run in a browser.

There's nothing new about running a large control in a browser.

[Mara57]

Actually, you CAN have Google Ad Sense block ads from certain URLs. I recently did this on my blog (http://blog.fetchthepaper.com) when I discovered that one of the ads placed by Google linked to a site that supports backyard breeders and puppy mills--something that is NOT congruent with my own beliefs. It does take some vigilance because obviously you will need to monitor whose ads are being pushed to your site and block them as you find them. But it can be done.