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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.
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.
If a corporation can make money on your stuff, you are not allowed to give it away.
America, by the corporations, for the corporations.
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.
I think it goes further than that. Here are some things that don't indicate one way or another whether they're illegal or not.
Downloading copyrighted material
Bittorrenting
Bittorrenting Copyrighted material
Downloading a DVD
Downloading a Movie
Downloading Photoshop from the internet
Not paying for software
Not paying for copyrighted software
Downloading music with bittorrent
Downloading Movies with bittorrent
It's the redefinition of language and linking terms with illegality that benefits large lobbyists to ensure more powers that hurts, here. It's not really a mentality so much as a sneaked in change in meaning that not all of us notice until we read lists like I made above and find a little gut feeling that some of them must be wrong and avoided, when there's no indication one way or another in the terms themselves.
Well he could distribute it via megaupload or similar. Oh-wait...
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.