Google disables AdSense account of user for sharing free book via torrent | Hacker News Reader

Google disables AdSense account of user for sharing free book via torrent

geekosystem.com

170 pointsjlengrand75 comments

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.

I agree completely ... unless you get on the front page of HN and one of the Googlers here (e.g. @Matt_Cutts) notices, you probably won't find anyone to help you.

Thankfully, the Hacker News front page doubles as a Google Customer Service Department quite well. We recommend you use inflammatory titles to expedite your case.

>We recommend you use inflammatory titles to expedite your case.

No "we" don't.

It does appear to be a form of rewarded behavior, so there is an implicit approval.

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.

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

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.

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.

Honestly? Not having to deal with support ranks slightly above dealing with support and having a great outcome. I suspect I'm not alone on this.

I've never had to return anything to Amazon or raise a support issue with Google (at least on their free products).

If the user had linked to a torrent hosted on its own domain, and the Adsense user got banned for it, then I'd call it an absurd outcome. Now I see a user who probably didn't read/understand/or forgot the Adsense policy. This was no false positive, if you follow the letter:

  AdSense program policies

  Publishers may not place AdSense code on pages with content
  that violates any of our content guidelines.

  Sites with Google ads may not include or link to:

  - Hacking/cracking content
  - Any other content that is illegal, promotes illegal 
  activity or infringes on the legal rights of others

Linking to The Pirate Bay or Demonoid could be in violation of above, regardless of whether you wrote the book or not.

I wonder if the same holds for organic search and that it could hurt your rankings. If Google deemed The Pirate Bay a "bad neighborhood", their Webmaster Guidelines seem to say so:

  Linking schemes can be:
  - Links to web spammers or bad neighborhoods on the web

I don't expect Google to follow my links to a shady domain, check if the torrent is a lone non-infringing Linux distro, or one of the many other infringing torrents on The Pirate Bay. That might be possible though.

EDIT: http://python-ebook.blogspot.nl/ if the links appeared in the sidebar, like the new link to a self-hosted torrent, it meant that two links to a bad neighborhood were on every page of that website, not just a lone link.

  "Why? Because they claimed he was distributing copyrighted
  content illegally." - Techdirt

But quoted just below is the Google email with the claim:

  "Violation explanation
  ... as well as providing links for ... sites that contain
  copyrighted material."

Perhaps the wording could use some fine-tuning (sites that contain copyright-infringing material) and match the specific violation more closely. But is this Google failing to communicate? Or an Adsense user failing to follow the rules and failing to understand the, still pretty clear, feedback. At least I find the title "Google disables AdSense account of user for sharing free book via torrent" not factually true and rather sensationalist.

No, it was a false-positive (few people think he should be banned for using Pirate Bay LEGALLY for distribution), but not a "bad" false-positive. Google's initial banning was reasonable. But providing no effective way to contest this (other than getting noticed on HackerNews or TechDirt) is the REAL problem.

The Adsense account was positively banned for linking to the Pirate Bay and Demonoid (sites that host infringing content and cracks) on every page of the site.

Then the Adsense account holder contested and received a positive explanation of: You offered links to pages on content-infringing domains.

No one, not even Google, wants to ban, or did ever ban, Adsense accounts, simply because the account holder used the Pirate Bay to distribute free stuff it owns the rights to.

I totally agree that there is a problem with the support channels. To me the REAL problem is: user breaking the rules, contesting, getting feedback about which rule he broke (the linking part), finally deleting the links, contesting shortly after again, account didn't get reinstated immediately, so user goes to the media and they twist it into an unavoidable, bad PR story of Google mistaking this guy for a distributor of copyright infringing material and offering no explanation or recourse.

As an aside: The Pirate Bay is inaccessible to many Dutch ISP users, when the courts deemed that the site mainly exists to facilitate copyright infringement.

"sites that host infringing content"

Since when does Piratebay host any infringing content? There's only links to infringing content. Google also links to infringing content.

Yeah man, thousands of paedophiles just love Google.

I'm not sure why people keep saying this. Google provides tech support forums, which are responded to by Google employees.

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...

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.

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...

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

4. http://craphound.com/rotn/download/

Not to forget that even mainstream bestselling authors actively endorse and co-operate with Piratebay:

http://torrentfreak.com/paulo-coelho-supports-the-pirate-bay...

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.

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... (And he complains about automated scanners flagging legit files as copyright violations: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/11/imbecile... )

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...

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...

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_...

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.

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.

what plans does google have to curb these false positives triggering actions on people's accounts? sooner or later, the media will tire of these stories, which means google will never notice.

whether google intends it or not, real people rely on google services for income, and losing this income can cause hardship.

You're asking the wrong question here. It's not "what plans does Google have?", it's "what incentive does Google have?" and the answer is none.

And as he discusses there, he's no longer saying "go grab it on The Pirate Bay."

I don't see Google having any problem with giving away your own stuff, or even giving away your stuff via torrent (despite the misleading headline here on HN). The problem is linking to TPB, which Google wants no part of.

I don't think the title is misleading. It's a pretty naive and obvious way of having a free book. There is nothing wrong with it, except in the eyes of google's automatons.

> after we saw the article on Techdirt

It's unfortunate that Google is still relying on the press/blogs as a means of elevating customer support tickets.

I know this stuff isn't easy, but I really hope some serious effort is going on to make Google better at customer support. It's a major blind spot. Automation is great, but it will never account for every possible scenario.

Actually, I'd argue it is relatively easier than Google is making it. It's a solved problem. It's called a "customer service department". They've been around for probably a century now.

And yeah, Google doesn't want the overhead of such a department I get it. But there isn't even an automated solution to this. A human still has to deal with these issues, but now they have to be taken off of their normal line work to handle these cases.

The "solution" to manual or automated cusomter service is not to just get rid of customer service.

I'm guessing there's some ripe patent territory hiding behind the artificial constraint of declining to offer customer service.

It's a pity that Google don't have a better way to handle problems with Adsense. In most cases I can see the benefits of not offering customer service, but when you're talking about losing individual customers making Google $10k+ per year, I would have thought some kind of personal contact beyond a non-specific copy-paste of adsense rules would be intelligent.

(I speak from experience here. Adsense was disabled on my own site - which does about 600k page impressions a month - in late August, for some very vague reasons. I'd appeal, but I don't know what I was doing wrong, which makes fixing it rather hard. Instead, I've been working on replacing Adsense revenue with other sources - but that has its own problems.)

Google has account reps. They have "Adsense in your city." You can meet them.

The problem is, when they kick you off, they don't tell you why.

We had an issue with a project I was helping someone on. Google waited until the very end of the month to terminate the account, leaving that business associate out a mid five-figure amount of $$$. It was really jarring because the traffic was legitimate. I know, because I could see good conversions coming through ad campaigns I was running.

We spent months trying to figure out why the hell the account was terminated. Finally we got a pretty good guess over what caused the termination -- something the Google account rep said was "ok." This was in writing.

The best solution right now is to personally know people who work or worked there. That's an unrealistic "fix" for 99.9% of customers.

I'm not sure if a human or a machine making the decisions is worse. What scares me most is having competitors bribe Google employees to do things that put me in an unfair position. Alternatively, Google employees who are "entrepreneurs" running stuff with inside information and power. I know from a friend that the first has happened, and we know from court cases the latter has occurred as well. Google's traffic is worth an incredible amount of money, and as long as it is this is going to be a problem.

The only solution for 'godlike' demon is to kill it. The world will be probably better without Google.

Hi Matt, Would be nice if AdSense could go back to the 'old day's - that is, we could speak to an actual Human being, instead of being ignored via canned responses :)

I understand Google having actual Humans responding to their customers/publishers would be tricky due to the scale of things, but the current system seems too impersonal and I hear of these stories all the time? Not everyone has the luxury of being published in the mass media (which seems to be one of the only ways that Google will nowadays change its mind)

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?

It seems like I am in a similar situation - having a site with user submitted icons and mouse cursors. And I got an email informing me they will not show ads on that site. The page mentioned in the email contained an icon of the "pedobear"... (see wikipedia) Oh, Google...

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.

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.

Out of curiosity do you know any stats on ad earnings from them vs Google Ads? As I'd imagine for the majority of people they're looking for maximum return, and willing to cope with the lack of customer service.

(I have no stake in it, I use no ad networks but I am genuinely curious).

The problem is that with AdSense, there is no "coping". The lack of customer service means that once their algorithms decide that you are breaking the rules, your account is just gone, along with any money earned since the last payout. If you're going to rely on AdSense for revenue, you had better have another ad service in the chamber.

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.

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.

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.

Conversely one thenth of a google at the competitor is better than 0 from google.

There are very very very few situations where anyone will "rake in money" with sites like Project Wonderful. If you're a very specific type of site (have adverts in prime locations and have an audience that is visiting your site looking for something presented in the advertisements) you might make money, but otherwise PW and alternatives will make you a pittance.

Take a look at their top sites list... MS Paint Adventures (a super popular webcomic) has "3,671,690 Average Page Views (past 5 days)" and costs $35 per day. $35 per day for 3.6 million page views?

The highest per day website on Project Wonderful is minecraftservers.org making $100 per day. That is not "raking it in" in any sense of the phrase.

I love projectwonderful and think their interface and service are great, but they just don't have the penetration, the publishers are all tiny, they need a bigger sales team or something, go out and find more and better publishers.

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

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.

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.

>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.

Any one else reminded of Minority Report? The google precogs found you guilty of future crime..

> 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.

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.

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.

Same thing happened to us. Except they cut us off the 2nd time we got over the minimum payout threshold.

They asked for logs when we were using Google Analytics...

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?

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.

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 :).

Is that so? Entering thepiratebay.org to Google search returns very relevant results.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

It's not even a matter of Google being sued -- sites that link to pirated content are frequently sites that advertisers don't want their ads to run on, even if those sites are perfectly legal.

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.

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).

Shutting down Google could be a good line in the CV of a legal practitioner.

Original, non-blogspam article: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120923/22351120487/google...

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.

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

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.

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.

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)?

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

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

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