

Rousting the book pirates from Google - zabramow
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/30/your-money/rousting-the-book-pirates-from-google.html

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Zuider
"As bad, when the company acted, he stated, it would often remove pirated
e-books but allow e-book pirates to remain on the site."

This tolerance of outright, blatant theft stands in striking contrast the
draconian approach that Google takes to Android app developers who can be
perma-banned without appeal from all of Google's services if they are even
suspected of minor infringements of Google's policies.

"In May, Google stopped enrolling any new self-publishing authors."

And this is why we can't have (semi) nice things. I love reading crappy fan-
fic and worse poetry.

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hahainternet
I'm impressed that in literally two lines you took two different approaches to
criticising Google.

They didn't ban them enough, then when they banned them, that was too much.

What are you trying to say, because it's completely incoherent.

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jarcane
It seems a perfectly consistent criticism to me. Rather than do their due
diligence, Google threw the baby out with the bathwater by shutting down the
whole program.

Sadly that is unsurprising in a tech world that so often likes to pretend it's
powerless to police its own content.

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DanBC
If Google (very many smart people, massive amounts of data, massive amounts of
processing) can't do it then it seems like it could be a hard problem.

The abuse of ContentID on YouTube, or auto-generated DMCA requests, show that
letting content owners report stuff doesn't work particularly well at scale.

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jarcane
"Hard"? Or just "expensive" and "not easily automated away"?

Because there's a difference.

In this case though, I struggle even to see how _that_ applies. The examples
given are literally cases of _identical_ text content between pirated and real
works. We've had text figured out for a while now, it's not like it'd take
image recognition software to see that the diff between the two books
literally amounts to two words for the bogus author's name.

