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Google Blocks Author's Ads For Offering Torrent Of His Own Book
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.
Its only going to get worse.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Copyright enforcement by software: the speed camera of the internet...if the traffic ticket were set to eliminate your whole wage. Actual people could review this stuff...or we could all accept that if you use the tools a giant corporation provides to you at essentially no cost, you are totally at their mercy.
I would write something insightful but then the copyright police would come after me for violating my own copyright.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
Given the numerous articles about copyright enforcement bots recently, it makes me wonder why there is so little human oversight about account banning. Or even attempting to match the author to the work to the copyright in question to the offending post. Apparently, it is better to throw out all the apples, and review the ones that that claim they aren't bad.
It also makes me wonder why it seems difficult to talk to an actual person at google about account restoration. I hope to never have to go through the process.
greed@All_Evils:~#
If a corporation can make money on your stuff, you are not allowed to give it away.
America, by the corporations, for the corporations.
This is why the 'torrents == piracy' mentality is such an issue - torrents are seen as such a red flag these days that it has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. People are unwilling to use BitTorrent as a distribution method as it's seen as a bad thing.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
It really isn't just about auto-copywrite-infringement bots. It's really about non-overrideable bots with no human oversight in general. This problem reminds me very much of a problem I had a week ago, in which I wanted to put a large purchase on a credit card (then pay it back like the next day, with money I'd just been paypal'd, but that hadn't made it to my bank yet). I told the bank a week in advance: I am making a large purchase on this date, please don't flag it as suspicious. The response back was that they would make a note, but it would probably be marked suspicious anyway, and there was nothing they could do about it.
So I get there, I try to make the purchase, and sure enough: the charge is canceled and my card is suspended. So I call up the bank, tell them what happened, ask whether they can fix it. Answer: nope, it was all automatic, you'll have to call back later and hope someone with more privilege than a first-level phone support operator has is around. Thanks a lot, every-bank-on-the-planet (cause really, it's not just that one bank, they're all like this now.)
Yes, computers are getting more powerful. Yes, you can cut costs by hiring fewer humans to do superfluous things. You can cut costs even more by hiring fewer humans to do things they're really required to do, and just do a frelling terrible job of it as a result. But at least keep one person around at all times to clean up after the resulting mess, please, every company ever? Thanks a lot.
If you have a google adsense acct, torrent your novel, grocery list, anything trivial or not, that you own copyright to, and post an ad to the link. Make the automated tools as useless as possible and show that a 'guilty by default' rule is just WRONG.
The default assumption of these automated checkers is that anything shared is infringing.
I've run into this myself. While I give away my book Modern Perl free in electronic forms, my publisher charges a nominal fee for the Kindle version to cover expenses. I made some changes recently to fix some formatting problems and edit out a couple of typos. After I uploaded a new version, the Kindle copyright police declined the update (to a book they'd already allowed in their store) because they thought it was available online for free elsewhere.
I understand that no one wants a million copies of Wikipedia articles clogging up book stores, but it would be nice if there were a way to say "Yes, the contents of this book are available under a Creative Commons license and I have the right to distribute it."
(My publisher has the same right to distribute the printed copy, and Amazon is very happy to sell that version.)
how to invest, a novice's guide
is that we don't talk about copyright.
The second rule of copyright, if you feel like violating the first rule, is that all copyright belongs to big rights aggregators and media monopolies until extensively and conclusively proven otherwise.
The third rule of copyright is that all copyright belongs to big rights aggregators and media monopolies even after extensively and conclusively proven otherwise.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
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 is also a victim here, a victim of language re-defined by rights-holders (those who usually aren't creators) such as the RIAA, MPAA, BSA and the like. They've been given power, and they use it to redefine terms. That affects how we think and react.
The obvious difference, since it seems you missed it, is that a multi-billion dollar company like Google actually has the power to do something about it, but instead, they play the game, because regardless of what they claim their company philosophy is, the bottom line is... well, their bottom line.
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.
Welcome to Capitalism, comrade.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
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.
Isn't this is exactly what the large publishers/record companies/movie producers want? Make it more difficult to publish or own stuff which makes it harder to compete with them? Remember when you had to be a computer nerd to make a website to share information? Now anybody who can click a mouse can post whatever they want on Facebook or elsewhere. That's exactly what the publishers don't want to happen to them.
The only way this problem is going to be improved is if the law requires some sort of human oversight, and somehow held accountable for such blatantly false takedown notices. Not that I see that happening anytime soon.
Yeah, good luck with that. You can post something on a message board they'll ignore and that's the extent of customer support it seems.
I've been trying to resolve a Google AdSense issue for a year, and they just don't seem to give a damn.
-- This sig is only a test. If this were a real sig it would say something witty. --
So, has anyone ever tried to resolve an Adsense dispute with Google and not have it ignored or denied?
Yeah, evidently I got banned from Adsense for life because I put some ads on our forums and the kids did the darnedest thing... they actually clicked on them. A whole lot of times. I really didn't have any control over that. So they kept all the money I was to be paid from ALL of my sites (not just the one that the kids were clicking on), and banned me from Adsense, seemingly forever. I would click on the appeal button and ask what is up, and 6 months later they just say "denied".
I tried some of the other ad networks like Chiquita and Bidvertiser, but most of the ads were misleading or for scams and I had to delete them. The ones I did keep, on the most popular of my sites, have earned less than $1 in the entire time they have been up. Basically, Google has a monopoly on online advertising for small websites, so I'm pretty much screwed on ever making money from website advertising ever again.
Thanks for clicking on the ads, kids! Not...
(I wonder if this means that you can royally screw over websites by going and clicking on their ads every day?)
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.
Google blocked my AdSense on one of my websites a while back. The only reason stated was "torrents". The torrents on the site were for completely legal documentaries about false-flag terror. Google does not care what torrents are for, if you post a torrent on your site for your own work or works you can legally distribute then they will simply block you on the grounds that you are using a completely legal distribution protocol called BitTorrent.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
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
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