
Google disables AdSense account of user for sharing free book via torrent - jlengrand
http://www.geekosystem.com/google-aggressive-ads/
======
mcherm
This again points out the REAL problem with customer relations that companies
like Google have. I would have no objection if Google banned him, then he
appealed, explaining the situation, and they reinstated him. But since Google
fails to provide a WAY to communicate to a human and appeal a situation, it
leads to absurd outcomes like this one.

~~~
paulhauggis
Amazon is the same way. I don't understand why so many people base their
entire businesses on companies that don't even give them any kind of real
support...especially when you are making them money.

~~~
bad_user
What problems have you had with Amazon? Whenever I've had problems with AWS,
they replied promptly.

~~~
keidian
Personally I know that I've had a couple inquiries about my AWS account get
ignored and the one that finally got an answer came after I had given up and
done what I wanted elsewhere.

~~~
lurker14
Are you on paid support with an SLA?

You can argue that the price of support is too high to be worthwhile, but
that's different from saying they don't provide support.

------
Matt_Cutts
Looks like Google re-enabled this account a few hours after we saw the article
on Techdirt: [http://python-ebook.blogspot.com/2012/09/google-ads-are-
back...](http://python-ebook.blogspot.com/2012/09/google-ads-are-back.html)

It's unusual for an author to post a torrent link to his own book, and so I
understand that this happened, but it's an unfortunate mistake in my opinion.
I hope the team will take the situation as a chance to see whether they could
have handled things differently.

~~~
mindstab
I don't know about that. More[1] and more[2] authors[3] these days are
giving[4] away their books for free online as a form of advertising.

1: <http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm>

2: [http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-
static/fiction/accelera...](http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-
static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando-intro.html)

3: <http://www.kschroeder.com/my-books/ventus/free-ebook-version>

4\. <http://craphound.com/rotn/download/>

~~~
Matt_Cutts
I agree that more authors are giving away their books online for free (John
Scalzi, for example). My point is that it's unusual for authors to do it by
pointing to a torrent.

Of the four examples you mentioned, the authors provided links in a wide
variety of formats (ePub, HTML, TXT, Mobi), but I didn't see any torrent
links. All the links I saw in a fast scan were direct download links. I think
that's much more common than an author posting a link to a torrent.

~~~
mbrubeck
It's less common but hardly unprecedented.

1\. Charles Stross (one of the four examples above) used to point readers to
BitTorrent for his free book downloads:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20090514034859/http://www.antipop...](http://web.archive.org/web/20090514034859/http://www.antipope.org/charlie/accelerando/)
(And he complains about automated scanners flagging legit files as copyright
violations: [http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-
static/2009/11/imbecile...](http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-
static/2009/11/imbeciles.html) )

2\. Unni Drougge use The Pirate bay to post a torrent of an audio version of
her best-selling novel: <http://www.p2p-blog.com/item-1029.html>

3\. Larry Lessig releases his book "Free Culture" as a torrent:
<http://lessig.org/blog/2004/03/free_culture_is.html> (And of course, a USC
student had his network account disabled for downloading this completely legal
torrent: <http://boingboing.net/2006/08/25/universities-put-hol.html> )

4\. Dan Morrill posts a torrent link to his book about selling e-books:
<http://torrentfreak.com/my-book-please-081017/>

5\. Megan Lisa Jones self-publishes a novel through BitTorrent:
[http://ibla.us/2011/content/thoughts-on-the-bittorrent-
promo...](http://ibla.us/2011/content/thoughts-on-the-bittorrent-promotion-
and-monetizing-a-book/)

6\. Caris O'Malley posts a pirate torrent link of his own novel and encourages
readers to download it: [http://hipsterlibrarian.com/2011/08/04/illegally-
download-th...](http://hipsterlibrarian.com/2011/08/04/illegally-download-the-
egg-said-nothing-today/)

7\. Wired editor Chris Anderson links to a torrent search for his book "The
Long Tail":
[http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/2007/02/books_want_to_...](http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/2007/02/books_want_to_b.html)

~~~
ommunist
You forgot about free movies, free games and, gosh - free Linux distributions!
IMHO - Google crossed the line and should be punished by everyone using Yahoo,
or DuckDuckGo.

~~~
Semaphor
Sadly neither of those give me the search results I'm looking for. I've tried
several times to use DDG especially but 90% of my searches were followed by
searching again with !g.

------
no_gravity
Google disabled Adsense for one of my domains because in a Forum on that
domain a user explains what a "blow job" is. Which is related to a movie the
discussion is about. The forum in question does not contain adsense adverts
and the domain is not at all related to adult topics. They blocked the whole
domain anyhow. Giving that one Forum page as the reason. Even though the
domain has tons of content and thousands of other discussions.

I appealed but only got a generic reply not related to the situation.

So what does that mean? No adsense if anywhere on your domain there is a
forum?

~~~
whileonebegin
Not to turn this into a "Google banned my Adsense account" thread, because
there are plenty of those on the DP forums etc, but I had the same thing
happen for an equally absurd reason.

Google mysteriously banned my account because someone on the same IP
apparently got their account banned due to a domain expiring. The whole thing
makes no sense.

I've even heard horror stories of someone moving into an apartment where the
prior owner had his Adsense account banned (through coincidence, both tenants
were webmasters), and upon the new tenant logging into his Adsense account
from the new apartment's IP address, his account was subsequently banned, by
relation.

I'm surprised Google is able to continue making money when so many web sites
are outright banned for no just-cause. Then again, income from Adsense has
dropped substantially over recent years, so I'm not sure how many users still
click those ads.

------
sergiotapia
For a non-bullshit advertising provider I highly recommend
<http://www.projectwonderful.com/>

You create an ad box with them, they give you a snippet to past anywhere on
your site. People bid a-la eBay for any amount of time they want to display an
ad on that box and you rake in money.

You can then transfer that money via Bank or Paypal, couldn't be simpler and
it has _gasp_ customer service!

Fuck Google.

~~~
chmodd
The problem with AdSense is not that there are no alternatives (there are
plenty - chitika, adbrite etc.) The problem is that those alternatives pay
way, way less. All the customer service in the world isn't going to help if
your website makes 10x more with AdSense than with any other ad broker.

~~~
mistercow
I don't know about chitika, but I used adBrite and never saw a dime from it,
whereas I was able to make a modest amount with Project Wonderful. Not as much
as AdSense, but unlike AdSense, Project Wonderful never accused me of fraud
and then ran off with over $300 that I had earned through their service. If I
had known how Google would treat me, I never would have signed up, regardless
of how much I made in the meantime.

~~~
codexon
It was really easy to make a tiny amount of money from adbrite.

The minimum payout is only $5 iirc, which is much more easily attained than
the $100 from adsense even though they pay less per click. The annoying thing
is the 90 day delay.

------
conradfr
Well I still don't understand why they banned me from AdSense and stole my
money, at least this guy seems to know why ...

~~~
mistercow
Did they accuse you of click fraud? That's what happened to me. Some research
uncovered that all it really takes is one person who's angry at you to go on
your site and click your ads repeatedly. If you search around, you can find
stories of disgruntled readers, angry exes, you name it, and none of them have
happy endings.

If you knew the risk in advance, you could set up measures to prevent it, but
of course those measures would be in violation of the AdSense TOS.

~~~
conradfr
They just said it was "at risk to generate fraudulent activity" (loose
translation).

But AdSense was deactivated for years on my website, and there was like 20€
sitting on it (which was too low to be transfered).

Oh well, I will use something else for my upcoming real websites.

~~~
mistercow
>They just said it was "at risk to generate fraudulent activity" (loose
translation).

Wow, so they didn't even accuse you of fraud... just "pre-fraud". It's
especially funny since every active AdSense account is one malicious visitor
away from "fraudulent activity". I'm not sure how you can be more "at risk"
than that.

~~~
joshuahedlund
> one malicious visitor away from "fraudulent activity"

I worry sometimes about the potential for malicious drive-bys. I've thought
about trying to set up some code that registers when someone clicks on an ad
and and then shows a non-ad in its place for the next X page loads to try to
prevent that sort of thing. Not sure if it would work, though.

~~~
mistercow
As I mentioned a few comments up, I don't think you can implement a
countermeasure like that without violating the TOS. And even if you were
technically in the right, you'd be right back in the situation of automated
bots thinking you were up to something fishy and banning you.

~~~
d0de
Which part of the TOS do you think this would violate?

AFAIK you're not under any obligations to show Adsense ads to all users, or
all of the time. I know quite a few people who only show Adsense ads to search
engine visitors, for example, or block ads for people arriving with certain
referrers.

This seems like a similar move.

------
JimmaDaRustla
What tracker was he using? If he was running his own tracker, then this is BS.
If he was using someone else's that is typically associated with piracy (TPB)
then I would understand Google for taking down his account.

Edit: He is using pirate bay and demonoid. I guess you are the company you
keep in this situation. Maybe Google wouldn't have caught on, or would have
been more forgiving if the torrent was tracked on the same domain name?

~~~
danielweber
Yeah, claiming he lost for putting his own book "on a torrent" is burying the
lede. Google isn't going to touch The Pirate Bay with a ten foot pole.

~~~
jlengrand
Funny, cause I changed the sentence last minute. I had put "on TPB" first, but
changed especially not to be said that I wanted to point to TPB especially :).

------
phaylon
From the book author's blog it seems more that his account was flagged because
he linked to his book on The Pirate Bay and Demonoid.

~~~
Natsu
Yeah. As much as I hate the policy, there are a ton of people just waiting to
sue Google over infringement or inducement, so they probably feel that they
had to have blanket bans on AdSense for people linking to the Pirate Bay.

~~~
mtgx
TPB is not an inherently illegal site. Legal content can be offered through
torrents and TPB. But the question is, why is Google acting like judge and
executioner? I won't even go into the fact that I think _linking_ to no matter
what should never be illegal.

I'm starting to get tired of Google favoring the label and studio cartel and
being against the regular people through Youtube's ContentID system and
through increasingly more stuff like this, just because they'd rather be on
the safe side.

~~~
Natsu
> But the question is, why is Google acting like judge and executioner?

Because there are lots of people who make sites that are essentially pirate
content + ads and there are lots of people who will sue Google if they find
them sending money to a pirate site.

I'm assuming this was an algorithmic mistake, but you can understand how it's
hard for them to research the copyright status of each thing. I mean,
hypothetically, what if this guy was lying about it being his own work, or the
copyright was disputed by someone? Google ends up in the middle of it and
there's no real upside for them, because there are a lot of people who are
quite simply out to get Google over copyrights.

------
zackmorris
The answer to this is pretty simple and long overdue. We need writer's guilds
and developer's guilds, basically unions that protect the content producers
from abuse by large corporations.

All it takes is one lawsuit to shut down an ad service or app store. We forget
our power as citizens or opt out of it/throw it away so easily.

This is traditionally how environmental and other groups have stopped
corporations from impinging on the public's rights. I'm not saying this is
ideal, just, it's how it works because the corporations will never, ever
change unless we force them to.

~~~
click170
I agree, it's an interesting and appealing idea.

I think one of the biggest obstacles to that at the moment, at least in the
US, is the arguably earned reputation that some unions have as being
profiteering thugs, if not outright extentions of the mob itself. Those bad
unions have spoiled it for the good ones (and there _are_ good ones).

------
driverdan
Original, non-blogspam article:
[http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120923/22351120487/google...](http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120923/22351120487/googles-
copyright-crackdown-punishes-author-torrenting-his-own-book.shtml)

------
mtgx
It seems Google is becoming dead serious about including the "copyright
infringement" factor in their algorithms. I can only see this causing more and
more PR problems for Google down the line.

~~~
DanBC
Only if they don't sort out a better appeals process.

~~~
mistercow
They've been unfairly banning people for years now with no appeals process
whatsoever, and the effect it's had on their PR so far has been minimal. They
make good products, and they have made "not being evil" part of their _image_
, and those are the things that people care about. Whether or not they
actually live up to that image is a marginal concern.

------
lazyjones
Probably a good example for "how to scale" (a corporation) ... Apparently
that's the kind of tradeoffs one has to accept in order to become a behemoth
like Google.

------
lewisflude
As an aside - do you feel Google's customer service will improve over the next
few years? How would it benefit them (considering they already hold a monopoly
over the market)?

------
ommunist
Shall Google ban WoW for using torrent for distributing their own game
patches?

------
alan_cx
But, em, yet Google still have a custom search engine for torrents.

