Anyone ever heard of MarkMonitor? Googlecode.com?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I was trying to find a website associated with a textbook (the subject of a rant in the Pit a few weeks back). One link found through Google mentioned it, I clicked the link - and found that it contained the book itself, in PDF. Now, I know better than to go to a honeypot site (I hope!!) and I’m not into pirating books… but the site is googlecode.com. A quick search said that was a Gogle site - but a quick whois lookup shows it’s US-owned, registrar links it to MarkMonitor Incorporated, which seems to be a firm that specializes in brand protection, antipiracy, antifraud… in short, NOT something I’d expect to be hosting what is not likely to be a legal copy of a textbook.

But typing in the URL googlecode.com gets me to code.google.com. Typing in MORE of the URL gets me to some kind of project page, again at code.google.com.

So - what the heck is going on here?

Of note: the book in question is one that I already own legally (bought the dead tree and the online access even, as crappy as THAT is) so I don’t have any moral qualms about finding the download. But it’s just weird as hell to seemingly find this at a Google-owned (or MarkMonitor-owned, who is owned by Reuters) site.

2

It’s likely that googlecode.com was initially registered by a domain squatter, and Google used Markmonitor to help them take it over due to the obvious trademark violation.

code.google.com is a legit Google site intended for hosting open source projects. But bad guys do sometimes use it to host spam, porn, pirated files and so on - until Google finds and removes it.

3

Thanks - that makes sense. The highest-level of the URL (somethingorother dot googlecode dot com) does seem to be some kind of open source project.

I wonder if I should report 'em?

4

If you PM me the link I may be able to do something about it.