Google Blocks Author's Ads For Offering Torrent Of His Own Book 130
An anonymous reader points out the recent trouble of author Cody Jackson, who wrote a book called Learning to Program with Python. He offers the book for sale, but also gives it away for free, and he used the CC-BY license. In order to distribute the book, he posted links to his torrent of it. Unfortunately, this cause Google to suspect his AdSense account for his website. Even after removing the links, he was unable to get in contact with Google's AdSense team to get his accounts restored. After his story was picked up yesterday by Techdirt, somebody at Google "re-reviewed" his case and finally reinstated his account. Jackson had this to say: "One good thing about this is that it has helped raise awareness of the problems with corporate copyright policies and copyright regulation as a whole. When a person is unable to post his/her own products on the 'net because someone fears copyright infringement has occurred, there is a definite problem." This follows a few high-profile situations in which copyright enforcement bots have knocked down perfectly legitimate content.
Get used to it (Score:5, Informative)
Its only going to get worse.
The other problem... (Score:5, Informative)
The other problem is that the only way to get in contact with google is to have a story published on a high profile website.
Google contact (Score:4, Informative)
Google is a terrible company to get ahold of. I'd imagine that they might get a lot of phone-spam and useless complaints, so try to keep their support lines hidden, but when problems or bugs arise it's often very hard to find out who to contact.
This is especially true as they're supporting many "consumer" markets such as android etc.
He's lucky the press noticed (Score:4, Informative)
I've been trying to resolve a Google AdSense issue for a year, and they just don't seem to give a damn.
Too much dependence on Google (Score:5, Informative)
That's what happens when Google is the income source, traffic source, video host, blog host, stats/analytics provider etc etc etc. You inadvertently break one of their rules and you lose your business or a substantial part of it with no recourse or at best a long wait for an appeal to be considered with no guarantees. The result is people jumping through hoops to get around such issues such as by having multiple accounts with fake details (or real details but using multiple registered companies) .
People really need to break their dependence on Google (and any other almost monopoly) even if it initially means making a bit less money or having to do a bit more work, ie. install piwik for stats (or use statcounter) , install wordpress on your own server for blogs (or use wordpress.com), use other ad networks (there are many or you could even sell your own ads) and optimize everything as much as you can (test test test!), get traffic from other sources - amazingly it is possible!
In other words - don't be lazy! Google is not the only game in town, they just want you to think that.
Re:Google is also a victim here. (Score:4, Informative)
If Google sees more profit in "being a victim" to laws they could very well change, then they will do precisely dick to change them. Period.
Over the last few years Google has established a major lobbying operation in Washington, and has been spending significant amounts of money at trying to change the laws. The fact is that individual corporations, however wealthy or influential, don't actually have the ability to rewrite the laws, and certainly not in a timeframe less than decades.
Note that I work for Google, but I'm not involved in any of what's being discussed here. I did, however, have a chance to discuss the issues with an attorney Google hired to lobby against software patents. She was hired the same day I was and while going through our orientation I had a chance to chat with her over lunch. She had previously worked for other lobbying firms and had a deep understanding of how the system works, and her comment was that it can be changed, but at a rate of inches per year, not miles per hour -- and that for every lobbyist working to push the law one way there is another lobbyist pushing back the other way.
Look at some of the changes Google would clearly like to make: Software patents are nothing but pain for Google. The company has had to cave in and start acquiring and creating patents, but only because to do otherwise would result in being destroyed by them. Copyright law causes huge pain for Google. Not just because it ends up having to try to enforce copyrights -- even though it really couldn't care less; almost none of Google's business relies in any way on copyrights -- and not just because it ends up taking crap over its inevitable enforcement errors, but because copyright law as-is actively impedes much of what Google wants to do. It appears that the system has decided that Google's caching of web pages is probably okay, but there has been a lot of question and controversy which has cost a lot of money. There's the Google Books thing which still hasn't been settled.
An area in which Google is finally starting to make a little progress is the law around self-driving cars... but even there Google has really only gotten a couple of states to agree that it's okay for a car to drive itself as long as there's a human driver ready to take over at any instant and who takes full responsibility for anything the car does, which is only a small first step to what Google really wanted.
And what about SOPA? If Google is so all-powerful politically, why was the whole Internet blackout day even necessary? Why didn't Google just pay off the lawmakers in question and shut the whole thing down? Because it doesn't work that way. Many people criticized Google's post-SOPA efforts, saying that Google's efforts to help craft compromise legislation proved that Google didn't really care about the fundamental principle -- but influencing compromises is how you make progress in Washington and Google simply doesn't have the power to take a hard line and be successful.
There's no doubt that corporate lobbying does influence our laws, substantially, and probably excessively. But that's a far cry from saying that any corporation can just buy whatever legislation it likes -- and that is especially untrue for a new participant like Google. Google has only existed for 14 years, and has only gotten involved in politics in the last four or five years. Give them another 20 years of lobbying and they'll probably have built the sort of influence that may allow them to affect the laws in significant ways -- but it still won't be dramatic, or the changes very fast.
Honestly, with respect to copyright law, I think the first thing Google and other proponents of a more rational copyright world need to do is not lobby for changes in laws, but to educate the public. The public needs to understand that copyright is itself a compromise, where society grants a temporary ownership to a creator in order to increase the flow of works into t