Warning: SCAM campain from Filmora about shotcut

[ddennedy]

I have reported this to Google Search in 2021. After a lot of back-and-forth justification and proof of ownership and representation, they finally agreed to block ads containing "Shotcut"... but only in the U.S.A. (I did not limit my complaint to that as alleged below, but they took it upon theirself to do so since my company is registered in California.)

From: [email protected]

Hello Dan

Your complaint appears to be against all advertisers in United States. If y=
ou would like us to continue reviewing your complaint, please confirm that =
you provided a complete list of advertisers that are authorized to use your=
trademark(s).

If you do not provide a list of authorized entities, our investigation may =
restrict the use of these trademark(s) in ads from advertisers you would ot=
herwise approve, including your own ads. Your explicit authorization would =
then be required to re-approve the ads. If you have any advertising partner=
s, including licensees, regional branches, dealerships, or authorized resel=
lers that you would like to authorize, please provide a list of their 10-di=
git customer IDs and/or URLs to ensure that our investigation does not affe=
ct such ads.

Regards,
Monica
Google Legal Support Team

Wondershare (Filmora) is not the only guilty one: MovAvi as well. Both of these sites also have web pages that contain reviews of Shotcut in order to promote their own (gaming searches on "shotcut" as well as "shotcut review"). To be honest, these reviews actually tend to better than most of the reviews out there that are merely to serve as download frontends in software collections.
Also, someone made a ShotCut Android App in the Play store. That required a separate complaint that was not recognized despite this precedence:

We will not investigate your complaint regarding SHOTCUT because we did not locate active trademark registration(s) for these term(s) in Us.

In the U.S.A. trademarks are implied and not only registered. I have explained previously that every web page on the web site since 2015 has in the footer "Shotcut is a trademark of Meltytech, LLC."

Similar problems also occur in Bing Search, Microsoft Store, and no doubt other places. Sometimes, there are outright forks with only a name change--some with links to the source code and others not. And then there are rogue forks as free downloads and so-called cracks containing who knows what bundled.