Is audacity.de an official domain from the audacity team?

Because it sure looks like it, is top in google if you search for audacity and (German) users visit it to download audacity.

Me too. I had no reason to believe it was not official, so when windows defender detected a threat, I just disabled the antivirus for the period of downloading, thinking it was acting stupid once again.

Now I found out that your official site is this one. Who could have known or thought about that…

I used the search by the way “The following words in your search query were ignored because they are too common words: audacity de.”

If audacity.de is not official, which I suppose since you state that you would never bundle the download, then what is your progress on having it taken down? It’s damaging your reputation directly.

audacity.de is a malware / scam site.
I have complained multiple times to Google (who promote it through their listings), to Cloudflare (their hosting provider), but they have been allowed to operate for years, spreading malware and breaching our registered trademark. Feel free to log complaints with Google and Cloudflare about them.

The correct address for Audacity is: https://www.audacityteam.org/
The official facebook, Google+ and twitter accounts can be found at the top of the forum, near the Audacity logo.

Hey Steve,

thanks for the quick reply. That is horrible. I made a youtube video about getting a darts caller software to call your own voice. I recorded my voice with audacity, but first had to download it. My malware software warned me, but I double checked the URL and thought “well this looks very official, must be a false alarm”… nope.

So, I just found out yesterday, by coincidence, that this url was not official. I searched the net and found many others who disregarded the malware warnings because of the “official looking” (and mainly the) url itself.

The general opinion seems to be that audacity (audacity.de) is using a bundle or a distributer that is being recognized as malware, but that it’s not malware.

Actually, I was about to stop my worrying and conclude that it was indeed official and that I had done everything right, because of messages in others forum(s) (multiple) when I stumbled upon your “real” site.

This is a huge problem. I will also have to remove the youtube video and edit it to include a warning and the correct website.

I can see why they would not let you take the domain, as audacity is just a word, but from the contents of the URL it’s obvious that they just use you to scam people. Google should unlist them immediately. I’ll file a complaint as well. I am sure some influencial youtubers who use audacity and make tutorials about it would pick up your cry for help and ask their users to file massive amounts of complaints as well.

That should get rid of the problem quickly.

In the context of audio software, “Audacity” is more than just a word, it is the registered trademark of Dominic Mazoni (co-founder of Audacity). It is a clear breach of trademark, and I personally find it infuriating that so many big companies (Google, Cloudflare, Amazon, ebay, facebook, twitter …) do so little to combat it. Sadly this is a problem that is experienced by many free / open source software projects.

Okay, I just meant claiming the URL audacity.com because it’s a trademark will be difficult, because audacity is also a word. But in this case, they clearly breach your rights. I mean if it were a soft drink, they could probably use the domain audacity.de and you couldn’t win a fight. But in this case, you should win.

I filed a complaint for malware and spam (because they try to install weather software in the installer) with google. I will ask others to do the same. I am sorry man and I also hate it because I fell into their trap and don’t know if my system is safe now.

I meant .de. I changed my youtube video and I also made a warning video for Germans to not download from the .de domain. Thanks Steve

The problem still exists: audacity.de looks like an official Audacity page and provides an installer for Audacity 2.4.2 bundled with malware.
Please write a clear warning on https://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/German_Information and on https://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/De
You might even consider taking them to court!

I can write something about this site on that Wiki page of ours - but it doesn’t help those who land there just by Googling.

We have complained to the site owners and requested the hosting organization to take the site down as it breaches our trademark, but sadly to no avail.


We’ve thought about it - but we have neither the money nor the time - we are an extremely small group of volunteers who produce an support this project.

Peter

Done - please see

The Deutsch translation was kindly provided by my wife who is German-speaking Swiss. If you want me to tweak that at all just let me know how you think it should read auf Deutsch.

Peter.

Thanks for posting the warning. The German translation is fine, best regards to your wife.
The formatting on https://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/De is somehow strange:
WikiWarning.jpg

I already contacted some German authors of articles and blogs about Audacity that recommended audacity.de - all were very friendly and grateful and corrected their links immediately.

Thanks for doing that SqueezeBoxer.

Peter.

Thanks, I’ll let let know.

Looks fine on my W10 PC with Firefox


Peter

Untitled.png

There may be “no unsafe content” found by Google today, but:

  1. That website infringes Audacity’s registered trademark.
  2. On multiple occasions I have personally found downloads from that site, alleging to be “Audacity for Windows” that contain malware.
  3. This is the VirusTotal scan of their current version of “Audacity”: https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/128f53140b13a899bf6304ec2d5db4ebce33df7d3cf5e3386b97a9701a922fed/detection (27 anti-virus engines detected malware in this file)

That site is dangerous. Beware.

I tried reporting the website internally at Google, but neither removal from Search, nor blocking with the help of Safebrowsing is warranted, as at least currently no malware is distributed, and the installation of additional programms can all be disabled in the installer. (https://www.google.com/about/unwanted-software-policy.html)

Maybe a DMCA takedown notice applies to the use of the trademark (and all the logos/name), which might work to get it removed from search.
I think the only way is to talk to a lawyer (maybe the EFF can help) to try to solve this on the basis of a trademark infringement, so whoever owns the trademark gets the ownership of the site.

The official Audacity website (https://www.audacityteam.org/) already appears at the top of the search results at Google, DuckDuckGo, Bing, and Yahoo.

Also, Audacity in Windows App Store does say “This is the only official version of Audacity on the Microsoft store.

Searching from Germany, I see on
Google: audacity.de (the malicious site) on the top, the official site is 5th in the results
DuckDuckGo, Bing and Yahoo: the official site is on the top

So I believe they optimized the ranking of their page for google searches from Germany.
I also reported the site to google as others posted here.

Not sure if it helps, but I opened a complaint at our police station because of StGB § 263a:
https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stgb/__263a.html

I will post updates.

I received the answer that our judiciary is not able to obtain the address of the domain owner and so the case has been closed

This is strange as the .de TLD cooperation “DENIC”, does not allow unknown owners as far as I know. Maybe its possible to let DENIC delete this domain?!