
Google deletes artist’s blog, a decade of his work - LaSombra
http://fusion.net/story/325231/google-deletes-dennis-cooper-blog/
======
modeless
From Reddit: "I've read a few of Cooper's books and the short answer is yes,
pedophilia is a common theme in his writing (as is incest and necrophilia)."
[1]

I'm calling it now. It was child porn. Google doesn't like to go around
deleting people's stuff. When this has happened in the past it's been child
porn, which Google is obligated by governments everywhere to delete with
extreme prejudice. And of course they're not going to go around publicly
accusing the guy of having child porn, even if he did, so they will remain
silent. Neither will they tell someone who had child porn which exact piece of
child porn tripped their child porn detector, for obvious reasons. This is not
a Google issue; this is a law enforcement issue.

[1]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/4sx9aa/dennis_cooper...](https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/4sx9aa/dennis_cooper_fears_censorship_as_google_erases/d5da89a)

~~~
kennywinker
It's still problematic, even if the work was distasteful or even illegal.
There was no process involved, no chance for appeal, no explanation of the
charges that precipitated it. If it truly is illegal materials that violate
laws, then deleting it is deleting evidence and helping cover up crimes. If it
was art that borders on distasteful to some then google is deciding taste and
public values with private algorithms.

I'm not sure what the right thing is here. To require any publishing platform
to retain works they decide violates their TOS seems like a big burden. But we
live in a world where publishing seemingly _requires_ the cooperation the
private sector. If not google, at very least a hosting company of some kind.
If we want the allow social norms to change we can't stifle everything that
falls outside of the norm.

~~~
parineum
But possession of child pornography is what's illegal. They very well may have
reported the owner of the blog to the authorities but, in the mean time,
google was both possessing and distributing the material.

It's not that it's violating their TOS, it's that Google thought they may have
been violating the law.

EDIT: At least if that's what the content was.

~~~
true_religion
From the OP who said:

> "I've read a few of Cooper's books and the short answer is yes, pedophilia
> is a common theme in his writing (as is incest and necrophilia)."

Because of the words 'book' and 'writing', I have the impression that
everything there is written text and no certainly no pictures.

This puts it in a nebulous position, at least in the USA.

Dunlop v. U.S., 165 U.S. 486 (1897), ended up ruling that text-only content
can be deemed obscene and being text-only is not a reason to get total 1st
amendment protection. However later cases, decided there was a division
between erotica and obscene material, which is essentially decided on a case-
by-case basis subjectively.

When it comes to things such as obscenity, its not really enough to go by our
'feelings' and intuition on the matter.

For instance, would you believe the US is a fully functioning, 1st world
democracy, where sex toys are illegal (Alabama, upheld by State Supreme court
and enforced as recently as 2009)?

To me, personally, anything that comes entirely from someones fanciful
imagination, no matter how distasteful, should not be considered illegal
unless it directly results in the harm of another individual.

~~~
djsumdog
So in the US (and Japan and only a handful of other countries), fictional
depictions of under age or incestual content isn't illegal (per the court case
you referenced above), so long as you're not using real people to act it out.

This doesn't hold true for ... most of the rest of the planet. In the UK a man
was put in jail for Simpsons porn, something that's legal in the US (although
potentially a trademark violation; unless you can argue it's satire).

In Cooper's home country of France, fictional depictions are actually illegal
(books like Lolita are banned).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_regarding_child_pornograp...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_regarding_child_pornography)

But as already stated, even if legality wasn't the issue, yes they are still a
private company and can do what they want. The article mentions this and there
really needs to be an effort to educate people that they need multiple
backups, not just on-line, but on their own media.

~~~
programLyrique
No, Lolita by Nabokov is not banned in France. I saw this book myself in a
French library a few years ago. And according to French wikipedia
([https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolita#Les_traductions_fran.C3...](https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolita#Les_traductions_fran.C3.A7aises)),
a new French translation was published in 2001.

~~~
mistersquid
It's been a while since I've read _Lolita_. If my memory serves me correctly,
the novel contains no depictions of sex or sexual intimacy.

Amazing work of literature, by the way.

~~~
exolymph
That's incorrect. For example, the scene where HH climaxes with Dolly on his
lap.

(I don't think Lolita should be banned anywhere. It's not a pro-pedophilia
artwork.)

------
a3n
The hindsight-prescriptive comments here focus on backing up, and that's a
sensible practice.

But there was another kind of damage done here, to the man's identity,
location and voice. His blog and his email address were his public persona. He
used his blog and his address as identity, and as his channel of communication
with followers, other artists, and I assume most of his general online
communication.

That persona no longer exists. He's been all but disappeared, and it's going
to take a long time for him to reconnect.

The technical lesson that should be learned here, beyond backups, is to have
your own domain. You can still use services with your own domain. I've used
many ISPs and email services, and I've had the same domain since about 2000. I
used to use gmail (with me@mydomain.com). I use fastmail now. I've never since
2000 had to tell anyone to change my email address, because it's never
changed, even though providers changed. The subject of this article would have
a much easier time of reconnecting, had he used his own domain.

(Added to that, in the "backup" theme, download all your email as it happens.
I use thunderbird, and it does that for me. I once resolved a dispute with a
former employer because I had email that they had no incentive to find.)

Using your own domain is not absolute protection, because you don't really own
your domain, you rent it. Your registrar can decide to sell your domain to
someone else, and if your consumer rights were violated it's going to be
difficult to reclaim your domain. In the future I think we're going to need
meta-domains that can't be transferred, that _are_ our identity, but I don't
know how that would be implemented.

I said this person has been disappeared, which was a provocative use of the
word (this isn't Argentina or Chile in the seventies). But thinking more
broadly, consider that as our lives are lived more and more online, any
government could compel a provider to remove you. Even if it was unjust
removal, it could be so expensive to restore your presence that you just can't
do it. Harder to fight a government than it is to fight Google, if the
government decides it won't be moved. We have a no-fly list now that has no
associated due process. I can imagine a no-communicate list.

Which is all to say, try to be as self-sufficient as is practical, and as is
warranted by the importance of your communication.

~~~
leonroy
Fully agree with your comments, but I fear we're going in the wrong direction
with the silo-ization of the web and the decline in open standards being
ratified and used by large companies.

Just look at Google's hostility towards maintaining standardized IMAP/SMTP
support for third party mail clients. Google Apps and Office 365 would drop
IMAP access to their services in a heartbeat if they could.

Furthermore a lot of our online interactions are moving from open formats like
Usenet, IRC, XMPP and SMTP/IMAP to closed off walled gardens like Twitter,
Instagram and Facebook.

This artist's online presence could have been entirely based on Instagram and
Twitter for example and I bet many (younger than I) folks nowadays do eschew
email for other forms of communication.

I don't think self sufficiency in communication is a problem the end user can
be realistically expected to solve. It's up to engineers and technology stake
holders to try and push us back to a more open way of using these apps and
provide standards based communication.

I don't know how the heck we'll do that - I don't see any user pressure for
companies to even try, but news like this troubles me and I think it's going
to get much worse before people realize their data isn't their own and push
for it to get better.

~~~
Arnt
Hm, I've spoken to gmail's lead developer for imap many times over the years
and never detected even a hint of hostility. What have I missed?

~~~
Arnt
I'll elaborate a little.

The impression I have formed is that gmail will have whatever features
google's gmail-for-businesses product needs. If a considerable percentage of
customers (ie. the ones who pay per month and user) use a particular feature,
then that feature stays and is maintained.

~~~
daveloyall
Does not the ol' Don't-Be-Evil corporation owe it to society to maintain
features that support the common good?

I know from my experience in hwops that plenty of people on the corp domain DO
believe that they are working towards a better world--and that making more
money will only accelerate progress towards that goal.

The question is: are they wrong? Has Google lost its way?

Let's look not just at this IMAP issue but also at the OP as we ponder that.

~~~
aleh
XMPP is even better example than IMAP.

~~~
Arnt
Rumour had it that they tore down the federation due to an unmanageable spam
wave. Something about friend requests from spam puppets. I've never heard
details. Has anyone else here?

------
shrikant
Ah yes, the "customer support by Internet shaming" strategy, the only approach
that appears to work with inexplicable Google takedowns.

~~~
yosito
Seems to be the only approach that works with a lot of companies these days.

------
DavidWanjiru
When my brother died in 2010, I posted to that effect on Facebook. Many
friends (majority of them "real life," pre-Facebook/outside of Facebook
friends) gave their condolences. Others called me. A few messaged me, etc. You
get the picture.

That correspondence was, and remains, important to me.

Does Facebook own it? Can they delete it if they want to? Can they block me
from accessing it?

The answer, at least as far as current law stands, is yes they can. I imagine
the ToS that I signed up to indemnify them from any claims I may have.

But should they have these rights? If people had written me snail mail
condolences, I'd keep that archive for as long as I want.

From where I'm standing, Facebook, Gmail, etc, are like the post office, as
far communication between people is concerned. It just happens whereas the
post office sells postage stamps to senders, and rents post office boxes to
recipients, Gmail puts adverts in my inbox. In return, they deliver my mail,
and agree to store my archive for me.

That shouldn't give them unilateral rights to my stuff, any more rights than a
post office or FedEx or DHL would have (Oh look, DHL is actually a post office
off-shoot). Because although it is on their servers, it's my stuff, in every
sense of ownership.

The law currently favors them, but the law, I feel, will have to change. Even
if the ToS says they own my stuff, that will have to change.

~~~
dahart
We do have a problem because Facebook and Gmail are huge, and because people
are starting to assume the convenience and size of them somehow means Facebook
and Gmail should be considered public services and regulated as such.

While I see the same problem you do- that we're all at risk of losing the
correspondence and history that we care about, man do I think your reaction is
super weird.

Facebook and Gmail are private web sites, and always have been. _You_ are
mistaking them for public services, when they are not and never were public
services. Your mistake in no way means that laws should change or that
Facebook should be required to archive and provide you access in perpetuity.
You made a choice, and if you realize now that your choice comes with
implications you don't like, you should start correcting that choice yourself.
You should collect and gather your digital assets out from Facebook and Gmail,
and archive them yourself.

Facebook is not the post office. If you want the post office, use the post
office. The post office services cost you money, and Facebook's don't. The
post office does not archive your correspondence _at all_ , while Facebook
does. The post office delivers physical goods, while Facebook only delivers
digital goods. I am just not seeing any reasonable way to conclude that you
can treat Facebook like the post office in order to suggest that Facebook be
required to provide you what you wish for.

Your language is so strange to me - "That shouldn't give them unilateral
rights to my stuff". _You_ gave them your stuff. If you don't want them to
have it, don't give it to them.

I'm completely lost as to how the laws are unfairly balanced in this
situation. I'm normally in favor of all kinds of regulation, but this just
seems unreasonable to me to suggest that we should have laws that require
Facebook to provide you with permanent archive access. Do you want to pay for
that archive access, or are you demanding that the government ensure that
Facebook has to pay for it forever? The post office isn't required to keep
archives for you, how how does your analogy work here?

~~~
DavidWanjiru
The utility of Facebook to me is exactly the same as that of the post office.
The post office derives value from me by directly charging me for it. Facebook
doesn't, but it's not because they asked and I said I won't and so they
offered to offer me the utility anyway out of their benevolence. It's because
they found a way to have advertisers pay for it on my behalf, in return for me
looking at the advertisements of those advertisers. My attention and my
presence on Facebook has value, just as my cold, hard cash has value. The
reason I'm on Facebook is because it has a utility for me. If it didn't have
that utility, I wouldn't be on it, and advertisers wouldn't pay for my being
on it. When Facebook unilaterally takes away that utility from me, it feels
akin to the post office closing my P.O. Box with my mail still in it.

Facebook and Gmail are private websites. What is privacy we talk about?
Ownership? Investment? Is that all there is to it? Suppose the government
wanted to shut down Google and Facebook; would the public object? Of course
they would. Why would the public object at the closing of a private website?
After all, they don't own it, so what's in it for them? Whatever is in it for
them is what I'm arguing needs to be protected, and not necessarily under
Facebook's or Google's terms.

My comment was in response to a story where Google has deactivated somebody's
email address. Think about that for a minute. I receive payments for work I do
using PayPal. My ownership of my PayPal account, and hence access to money
I've worked for, is directly tied to my Gmail address. If Google can take away
my Gmail address, they are, effectively, taking away my PayPal "bank account."
Should they be able to do that, just because Gmail is "a private website"? I
don't think so.

I didn't give Gmail my stuff. They offered to carry my communications between
me and those I communicate with. I derive value from it, and so do they. It's
a business transaction like any other, even though no money changed hands
between them and myself. The world has come to know that David Wanjiru can be
found at dwanjiru@gmail.com. That arrangement has suited David Wanjiru. That
arrangement has also suited Gmail.

The question then is, who owns "dwanjiru@gmail.com"? If a prospective employer
who's had my CV for three months wishes to talk to me, they'll fire an Email
to dwanjiru@gmail.com. If my PayPal account becomes compromised, PayPal will
send remedial steps of action to dwanjiru@gmail.com. When the higher education
loans body in my country wants to pursue me for my college student loans, they
send Emails to dwanjiru@gmail.com.

How then can it be proper that Gmail owns dwanjiru@gmail.com, so much so that
at the press of a button, dwanjiru@gmail.com ceases to exist? And that this is
done without any reference whatsoever to this David Wanjiru person?

Do I pay for Gmail and Facebook? No I don't. But me and Facebook, or me and
Gmail, are in business as much as any other traditional, and protected
business transaction, and I feel that my interests in that transaction should
be protected too.

If they no longer wish to provide me that service, fine. But they can't block
me out at their own will. They can, and the terms of service I agreed to say
as much, but that's what I'm saying should change.

I'm not asking for Facebook or Gmail to mandatorily keep my stuff. I'm asking
that I be given an opportunity to keep my stuff if they're no longer willing
to keep it on my behalf, whether they're doing that because they want to cut
costs, or because, per them, I've violated their terms of usage. When I first
opened my Yahoo Email account, my storage was limited to 6MB. Megabytes. When
it got full, I had a choice to delete some, download others, and so on. I
didn't demand for more storage, because my deal with them said 6MB. (If I'm
not mistaken, I could pay for more if I wished to).

Now they offer me unlimited storage (with a few caveats). If they want to
revert back to 6MB mailboxes, they can't just unilaterally do so and get rid
of my excess. They'd give me a chance to save my stuff, just as they've done
in the past when they shut down services like 360 and Geocities. My argument
is that the opportunity to save my stuff should be mine by right, not simply
because Yahoo has good basic manners.

~~~
meanduck
> I'm not asking for Facebook or Gmail to mandatorily keep my stuff. I'm
> asking that I be given an opportunity to keep my stuff if they're no longer
> willing to keep it on my behalf, whether they're doing that because they
> want to cut costs, or because, per them, I've violated their terms of usage.
> When I first opened my Yahoo Email account, my storage was limited to 6MB.
> Megabytes. When it got full, I had a choice to delete some, download others,
> and so on. I didn't demand for more storage, because my deal with them said
> 6MB. (If I'm not mistaken, I could pay for more if I wished to).

There is "Gmail for Work" which does provide some of the guarantees you are
looking for. Though none regarding illegal content, as per the laws.

------
clishem
Somewhat relevant [https://xkcd.com/1150/](https://xkcd.com/1150/)

~~~
jagermo
Not somewhat, but really, really relevant.

Dude uploaded all his work to a service he did not control without having
backups or plans to move to a self-hosted blog. Hell, he could have used
wordpress.com if he didn't want the "hassle" of updating his installation.

And on top he didn't have local backups? I mean, what if his hard drive had
died? Would he have blamed WD or Seagate?

~~~
hackits
This makes me laugh my ass off. This is a bit of a pet peeve I have with
people and modern technology. They believe they have a right to use a service
even though they're not paying for the usage of the service. Then they turn
around shocked and angry when the free service is removed. `Why! why did they
do this to me, this is the biggest injustice! How un-professional of them!`.

Kind of like the dicussion I have with my collegues that `shouldn't you
know.... support the open source frameworks we use to make money with?`...
`Why would we do that?` ... Kind of leaves me speachless.

~~~
pyre
To be fair, Google's ad dept. wants you to put _everything_ about your digital
life into their services, yet nowhere do they warn you about backing your
stuff up with the same gusto that they put into getting you to use the service
in the first place. It's not quite a "Chad's Garage" scenario.

"I want you to give me something, while I hold no absolutely no
responsibilities."

Google doesn't operate their 'free' services out of the bottom of their
hearts. It's a business.

------
janekm
The fact that every single comment in this thread amounts to "should have
backed up" makes me a little sad. Is this really what we want to expect from
companies like Google? Is this acceptable? Is it just a "force of nature" that
I should consider beyond the ken of man?

What happened here is the abrogation of human responsibility onto algorithms,
TOS, with no apparent human oversight. A very disturbing trend, and I think
worth having a conversation about.

~~~
wpietri
Definitely. My dad, a now-retired programmer, was dealing with an error at his
bank in the 80s. It was a bunch of work and frustration. At some point he
asked why a thing happened and the rep said, "Oh, the computer just does
that."

He didn't say anything to her, but he was still mad when he talked about at
dinner that night. "Computers don't just do things! People make computers do
things. Every thing a computer does is something humans are responsible for."

I get why a hapless bank clerk would just blame the computer. But it's deeply
weird to me to see technology companies blaming "the computer", except now
it's blaming "the algorithm". We glory in how "software is eating the world"
and we take all the money that computers produce. But that sense of
responsibility often evaporates when something bad happens.

~~~
DINKDINK
>"Computers don't just do things! People make computers do things. Every thing
a computer does is something humans are responsible for."

I think the angle your father was coming at this was, computers are
deterministic. There are lots of times when computers don't act
deterministicly, flipped bits for one, also edge cases like Race Conditions
etc

~~~
Dylan16807
Flipped bits don't follow any pattern where you can say "oh it does that".
Race conditions are the responsibility of the programmers just like anything
else programmed in.

------
whack
I found the following cryptic snippet, from the Guardian's coverage of this
topic:

 _" He had a featured post, twice a month, where he would take ads by escorts
and highlight their literary qualities."_

I have little idea what the above really means, but it almost sounds like
advertising/marketing for prostitution. My best guess at the moment, is that
Google considered the above to be a flagrant violation of its rules, and
hence, shut down his page immediately.

I can understand if Google considers certain aspects of his page to be
unacceptable, but I wish they had notified him of the reason for their
decision, and given him a week's time to download all his data and transition
to a different website. As someone who relies on gmail/drive very heavily for
important documents/correspondence, reading something like this makes me feel
quite uneasy.

~~~
JohnTHaller
He was taking existing ads for escorts in the wild and critiquing them as
satire.

~~~
tamana
Are you sure it is "satire"?

~~~
Sylos
Definitely fits the definition: > A literary device of writing or art which
principally ridicules its subject often as an intended means of provoking or
preventing change. Humour, irony and exaggeration are often used to aid this.

~~~
DominikD
But shouldn't satire be pointed at powerful and not powerless?

------
mark_l_watson
Everyone should occasionally use Google Takeout to back up their stuff, but
non-tech users don't understand this.

I use my own domain and private email service but I do run my blog on blogger.
But, I have done the experiment of converting Google Takeout data for my blog
and hosting it on my own server. My default is to use blogger because I like
how comments are handled.

Services that Google and Facebook provide can be useful, but I view that as a
small add-on to my own web properties.

Edit: I also find it convenient to sometimes use gmail, but my important
personal and business email goes through a separate service that I pay for.

~~~
planteen
I had no idea Google Takeout existed. Thanks. I backed up my Gmail over IMAP
in the past but this looks far easier.

~~~
stephengoodwin
I love Takeout. Given how much of our lives is invested into digital platform,
I wish every Internet company had something similar to Takeout for user data.

------
webtechgal
This January 2016 crawl of the homepage at the WayBackMachine does show an
adult content warning so presumably, that (the adult content) was not in
violation of Google's TOS at least at that point in time:

[http://web.archive.org/web/20160125091732/http://denniscoope...](http://web.archive.org/web/20160125091732/http://denniscooper-
theweaklings.blogspot.com/)

~~~
webtechgal
Ha! Found a copy of the home page at last, cached just yesterday!! For those
curious enough, here is the link:

[http://106.10.137.112/search/srpcache?p=http%3A%2F%2Fdennisc...](http://106.10.137.112/search/srpcache?p=http%3A%2F%2Fdenniscooper-
theweaklings.blogspot.com%2F&fr=yfp-t-100&ei=UTF-8&u=http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:e4DJlbOV5E8J:http://www.dennis-
cooper.net/%20http%3A%2F%2Fdenniscooper-
theweaklings.blogspot.com%2F&icp=1&.intl=in&sig=CCAAR6c4TCWHwpM030gyVw--)

~~~
PhantomGremlin
Interesting find.

But now I'm really confused. That page still exists as of this minute:
[http://www.dennis-cooper.net](http://www.dennis-cooper.net)

The link from the fusion.net story is: [http://denniscooper-
theweaklings.blogspot.com/](http://denniscooper-theweaklings.blogspot.com/)

That blog does _not_ exist. So maybe we're talking about two different things?

------
elmar
One click and you have a backup...

[https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout](https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout)

~~~
M4v3R
The article says they've taken down his email address, so presumably he
doesn't have access to that page as well.

~~~
lorenzhs
I think the GP meant to say that you can prevent _future_ damage to some
extent through regular backups. When things have already gone wrong, it's too
late to start making backups. The cloud is no different from physical media in
that regard, even if the data still exists in some data centre, you can't
access it any more.

~~~
Sidnicious
I'm not aware of any tool to automate regular backups of cloud services, even
though many of them have “download everything” buttons like this now
(awesome). That sounds like a thing that should exist.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
If I could regularly have my computer auto-request a Takeout archive, and then
auto-download it when Google notifies my email it's been completed, that'd be
a tool I'd enjoy having.

------
ungzd
If it's really due to some kind of erotic pictures, then I don't understand
why often american companies like Google act like iranian. Is there any laws
in USA that allows to punish Google for hosting images of woman nipples? Why
both App store and Google play's TOS include sins from Old Testament?

~~~
icefo
I've heard that ad companies don't like to mix ads and boobies but I have no
idea why.

~~~
emodendroket
I'm guessing because associating your product with porn works like associating
it with charity in reverse.

------
AdmiralAsshat
Friendly reminder that your stuff is not "backed up" in the cloud unless you
have a local copy. Otherwise it just _lives_ in the cloud, meaning it lives on
someone else's server.

~~~
marcosdumay
Well, if you have read-only copies on different enough servers, owned by
different enough people, it's a backup to some degree. Security is never an
absolute.

But a local copy will almost certainly be easier to police for "uncorrelated
risks in the ways that matter".

------
_Understated_
Why did Google take him down with (presumably) no warnings? Or did they?

Can't Google (and others) program their bots to send a warning like "we have
received complaints about x. You have 14 days to resolve".

The nuclear option seems quite abrupt/harsh/final.

Edit: Clarity

~~~
joesmo
This is a new age in customer support, if you can call it that. Amazon and I'm
sure many other companies do the same thing. You don't even have to actually
violate TOS. That's probably why no one can reverse the decision. They'd have
to admit to closing the account on a whim (might be a bot's whim, but it's
still a whim), unrelated to any actual TOS violations. They can choose to not
do business with you anytime, even if you've paid them, and your only recourse
is to sue them. Yeah, that's going to work out well ...

------
corobo
Summary of the article

> It’s gone because it was kept entirely on his blog

Take backups.

~~~
soft_dev_person
They closed his email-account too, though? It has never occurred to me to
backup my entire Gmail archive. Should probably look into that now...

~~~
Bromskloss
Speaking of that, what is the best way to make a backup of the contents of an
email account (not specifically Gmail, but IMAP in general)?

~~~
sandij
An easy way is to use an IMAP client like the macOS Mail.app that syncs raw
email + metadata in .mbox format. You can find the files in ~/Library/Mail/V4.
Combine with Time Machine for extra backups in case you’re worried that your
mail server decides to clear your local copy over IMAP.

------
zby
Since a few years loggin into Blogspot (former Blogger) became very difficult
for me - I am constantly being bounced between the authentication pages, and
most of the time I end up with an error. I think Google is just preparing for
discontinuing it.

~~~
panglott
There are still a _ton_ of pages in Blogspot. Closing Blogspot would be a
Geocities-closure-level event, or bigger.

~~~
GadgetJax
They aren't paying? Shut it down!

------
cft
There is a legal definition of child pornography:

[https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2256](https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2256)

Did his work fit this definition? I doubt it, because he would have been in
jail by now, given that he never concealed his name. Also Google is notorious
for heavy handed treatment of smaller AdSense publishers, which makes me
doubly sceptical.

[http://www.webpronews.com/another-publisher-goes-after-
googl...](http://www.webpronews.com/another-publisher-goes-after-google-for-
unpaid-adsense-earnings-2015-01/)

~~~
Pica_soO
Who cares anyway, algorithmically full time surveillance of the public
basically castrates pedophiles, limiting them to fiction.

So the usual will happen, public shaming of the "artist" into some pseudo-
religious organization, where he/she/it can be forced by the "believers" to
uphold some the marriage/basic-income-for-beauty Contract. Another horrific
social machine from the past.

Could we at least pressure potentially creative persons into something
socially useful? He/She/It who makes the biggest scientific contribution of a
group of three, gets a good life and "surveilanced" freedom, the median gets
publicly outed and "surveilanced" freedom, the least contributing goes to some
prison. Repeat every year.

------
NameNickHN
I can never understand why people don't host important stuff/stuff they care
about themselves. Webhosting and domains are cheap and even someone with
little technical knowledge can create a website. There are tons of options to
do that.

~~~
afarrell
There is a certain feeling of frustration that comes from doing an unfamiliar
and difficult technical task when you aren't at all used to doing such things.
My wife's best explaination of it is that it feels like gears in your mind are
grinding without oil: not moving smoothly and generating a lot of heat. I
infer that many other people feel this way about web hosting, or services like
weebly would not exist.

The real problem is a lack of backup. There should be a service that you can
pay to have it periodically crawl your website and generate a zip file, so the
real problem is that he didn't use that.

~~~
obj-g
But perhaps if your whole goal is to be a "web artist" or however you define
what he was doing, you _might_ take the time to learn how to make a simple
site.

~~~
sp332
And maybe if your actual work is keeping you busy, you might not want to have
to deal with all that on top of it.

~~~
obj-g
You might not want to, but maybe you should. Case in point.

~~~
Dylan16807
Not case in point. Whether you make your own site is completely orthogonal to
whether you have backups. There are people that use blogger or wordpress for
free and back it up, and there are people that pay for hosting or servers to
host customized websites and don't back them up.

~~~
obj-g
You're right, I guess. I suppose I worded it poorly. I really just meant that
if you're going to be a "web artist" you should probably be a bit more web
savvy in general. Make your own site, learn about backing up, etc.

------
bradrydzewski
I think a more appropriate title would be "Google disables artist's Blog". The
author describes the blog and email accounts as disabled and has no direct
evidence that anything has been permanently deleted

> I’ve asked about whether the work on Cooper’s blog has been deleted
> permanently or is simply on a server somewhere, and I’ll update this post if
> I hear back.

------
eplanit
More accurately stated: Artist stores (the sole copy of [1]) a decade of work
on a service he doesn't pay for and which provides no guarantees of service or
quality... Why is the title written to make it seem it was Google that did
something wrong here?

[1] Quote from the article: To make matters worse, Cooper says that the work
on the blog was only on the blog.

~~~
softawre
Do you really need to "source" a post like this?

------
slackstation
How does one make you primary artistic medium the internet for a decade and
yet don't know how it works enough to have backups of your work?

It's as if I worked in artistic welding but, never learned anything about the
dangers of highly pressurized tanks of gas and then get surprised when leaving
the tank valve open causes a fire and ruins your artwork.

He didn't have any backups anywhere else. He just completely relied on Google
to do it for free forever just because. After a decade of making work that
controversial, you never just save that stuff to jump drive?

This person is incompetent and irresponsible. Google owes him nothing.

------
emcrazyone
concerning to say the least considering every galaxy/Android phone I've owned
backs up to google in such a seamless & effortless way. My wife backs up all
our family photos to google. Google offers "Unlimited free storage" if you
allow them to compress your photos.

[https://support.google.com/photos/answer/6220791?hl=en](https://support.google.com/photos/answer/6220791?hl=en)

It's hard to convince people, like my wife, that putting a NAS appliance in
the house and explaining how to use it would be better but stories like this
help.

~~~
pjc50
A good case for "yes, and"; backing up to the cloud is convenient and subject
to very different failure modes to local storage. Why not both?

------
talideon
Never be a sharecropper, always have backups.

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
What is the meaning of 'sharecropper' in this context? I'm aware of
sharecropping in the agricultural sense[1].

1\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharecropping](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharecropping)

~~~
AndrewDucker
Working someone else's land, rather than owning your own.

i.e. rather than using Blogger, host your own blog.

This is, of course, beyond many people, which is why they use sites that
handle the hosting for them. But in that situation you should be _really_
aware that they may decide to take away "your" land at any point, and thus you
should keep backups.

~~~
nibnib
For a counter argument, I like to read many blogs that are more or less
defunct, but have valuable material. The author has moved on (or passed on)
but the material is still sitting on Google servers instead of disappearing
when a hosting contract lapses. perhaps using free services and making backups
is the best option.

------
elmar
How To Backup Gmail Accounts (+Restore)

[http://www.ubergizmo.com/how-to/backup-restore-
gmail/](http://www.ubergizmo.com/how-to/backup-restore-gmail/)

------
leepowers
So there's a good chance this guy is a creep. That doesn't change the fact
that any content any of us have posted to a third-party site (be it Google,
Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc.) can be taken down at any time, without
notification or appeal. Certainly these third-party companies mostly take down
the pedos and creeps, but that doesn't really matter. Power is delineated by
the maximum possible reach of their actions, not by how they choose to act at
any given moment.

------
Grollicus
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12097063](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12097063)
?

------
wstrange
It looks like his work is not deleted, just not accessible due to possible TOS
violations? I am guessing he can get it back.

The title seems like click-bait.

~~~
willemojnr
My thoughts too. Annoying.

~~~
eitland
Still happy to upvote it as is creates healthy and useful discussions.

Oh, and to help him and more importantly everyone else who is hit by google
service department.

------
JustSomeNobody
>“[If Google doesn’t] respond and rectify the situation, I won’t have any
choice but to sue them,” Cooper wrote. “I don’t want to do that for obvious
reasons, but I will if I have to.”

Really? Because you didn't take the necessary steps to create your own
backups!??

Edit: Reading some of the other comments about the ... um ... content ... of
his blog, no wonder he didn't keep backups!!!

~~~
Sylos
Victim-blaming isn't going to help anyone. And even if he would have had
backups, Google has completely dispersed his followership, too.

------
chillingeffect
This just underscores the need for a government to defend our rights.
Corporations can't be relied on to do it for us.

~~~
brokenmachine
Although I agree completely with your statement, especially wrt right to
repair and DRM, I don't know what you would want the government to do in this
case to protect a person's data when they choose to store it on a free service
that offers no guarantees of anything, and specifically states in their TOS
that they may remove an account for any reason at any time.

On top of that, this person chose not to take the simple step of using Google
Takeout to back up the years of data that he couldn't afford to lose. If my
business or mental health depended on that data, I'd be doing that every
couple of weeks at least.

I do think it would be nice if Google would, when they remove an account, give
you a couple of days to go to Takeout and download the data.

Just deleting it with no warning seems very rude indeed, especially when you
consider the amount of advertising revenue they generate from serving people's
data.

Google should also make less claims about, "A safe place to store your data"!,
if they continue to remove people's data without warning or recourse.

------
JDiculous
Reminds me of what happened to my old Youtube account. One day it was just
taken down - no warnings, no chance to back anything up (I had a backup on my
home computer, but that hard drive was reformatted while I was in college).
Contacted Google, and never got a response. Lost some videos I made as a kid
that I would love to see again.

Aside from the obvious "back up your stuff" mantra, this points to a couple
things:

1\. We need a decentralized web ASAP (eg. IPFS) 2\. Private corporations
should have some degree of responsibility over being reasonable with their
services. This guy should've at least been given the opportunity to back up
his stuff, or hell even just a response from customer service.

~~~
brokenmachine
Re: Point 1, I agree with you that we definitely need a decentralized web, but
I wonder how many people would be mirroring your youtube videos. Even IPFS
still needs your data to be stored _somewhere_. I have some youtube videos
with literally 2 or 3 views. Those wouldn't be mirrored on a decentralized
net. Zeronet is working on using "zerocoin" as a way you can pay the
decentralized net to mirror your data. This is a killer feature. I don't know
if IPFS has a similar feature but I hope so.

Re: Point 2, I agree completely, it seems way too draconian to just delete
immediately with no warning. With the size of google, there's always going to
be the chance that an account is removed by mistake. At least give people a
couple of day's chance to get their data before it is removed, if only as a
goodwill gesture of thanks to the millions of people providing free data for
Google to serve and make advertising revenue from.

------
Klathmon
>Early last year Andy Baio wrote about how most of the archival projects
Google touted in the early 2000s, such as Google News Archive and Google
Groups, were quietly abandoned several years ago.

Uh, aren't Google News Archive and Google Groups still alive and well?

~~~
Doctor_Fegg
In the sense that Google Groups has been "well" since the current design went
live. It's a slow, buggy, frustrating product.

------
jeena
There is no cloud, only other peoples computers.

------
swalsh
Ultimately this is where the decentralized web should go. Having a built-in
archive function, will not only prevent work from being lost... the
decentralization might prevent it form being shut down.

------
HappyFunGuy
Sue for damages and get the data back via discovery before you lose.

You could also ask your "fans" to send you their cached copies. Or you could
search your local browser history. Or you could hire forensic analysists to
examine any drives you may have had the data on.

You could also pay lots of fees and bloat up the bitcoin blockchain with it,
if you don't want to lose it again.

------
bigB
Regardless of content the fact that he didn't have backups is juts plain
stupid. Deserves pretty much everything he got. Im not sorry if that sounds
like im an a$$hole but people really need to assume their OWN responsibility
not blame others when things go wrong. 14 years worth of information is
something that should have been backed up if he didn't want to lose it, no
excuses.

------
Const-me
That’s one of the reasons why I prefer desktop-based e-mail clients.

With a desktop client, an e-mail provider like gmail is able to terminate or
suspend my account and prevent me from using my mailbox, but they can’t block
me from accessing the e-mails I have already written or received.

------
zippy786
Losing the email would be a disaster since the decentralized web is now
relying on a centralized email system.

------
bhartzer
I'm not going to comment on the topic of the content involved. But seems to me
that using your own doamain name (not hosting the blog on blogspot) and/or a
backup would have solved this issue.

Even if you're using blogspot, that's no reason not to have a backup.

------
leephillips
Well, at least he still has a Facebook account.

Whew.

------
ggggtez
Some on here note that the email account was also banned. Not to state the
obvious but isn't it possible it had nothing to do with the blog, and
everything to do with something else related to the account?

------
simbalion
Why would you keep 14 years of your labors on a server owned by an
uninterested corporation with no off-site backups anywhere?

------
seesomesense
Tldr; Child porn writer has works deleted by service provider.

