That this guy was banned from Google Play is meaningless. He would have been banned from the iTunes Store as well for apps like this. This post is just getting traction because it's Google and HN has an axe to grind against them.
Banned for Life
231–240 of 294 posts
Re: Banned for Life
#232The author used other people's content, packaged them into an app, and then repeatedly submitted the same app (with one minor modification -- the use of someone else's content) to the Play store. 'Beta' apps or apps that you write for close friends/family can be distributed via other means than the main app market. This article admits that he ignored all of the warnings he was given, and now accuses Google of unfair…
"I thought I was doing these guys a favor. The apps I wrote would have cost about $50,000 each if I had charged for my time. I basically donated $500,000 to the Android community. That’s how I saw things." This is where i stopped reading - the author is a bit delusional.
Yes, this is a bad post.
It gets close to an interesting question (using multiple Google services can result in a domino effect if you violate the TOS of one).
But it raises so many peripheral points, and is so full of whiny after-the-fact juvenile justifications like the one you noticed, that it's impossible to filter out the interesting part.
Re: Banned for Life
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
A good faith effort would be reading the terms & conditions. He obviously didn't, because they are quite clear about not being able to put other companies' names in your app name. If the article was about someone that had this happen, and they read the conditions and didn't see anything that they had violated, and then asked Google - that would be a different story. This guy just can't be bothered to put the effort i…
Yeah because I'm sure the T&C is only a page or two long, not like say 50k words. https://play.google.com/intl/en_us/about/play-terms.html The idea that you should have to scrutinize that entire document to determine what you did wrong is crazy. Ostensibly someone on the Google side of things determined what he did that was not OK right? I mean they don't just ban people for the hell of it right? He had to do somethi…
It's not crazy. Guess what, sometimes publishing an app is more than just writing code. I've had to dig through them before too. Compared to what the iOS team has to deal with I consider it a pretty lightweight process.
If you just want to hack around with some code, then post the APK somewhere and tell your friends to download it. If you want to publish an app in an app store, that is a fundamentally different thing. It's not even engineering. This is what product managers and legal teams deal with at companies. If you are a solo app publisher, you still have to deal with it. You don't get to opt out of these costs just because it's not fun.
Those aren't even the right T&C. These are the developer ones, and they're even shorter.
https://play.google.com/about/developer-distribution-agreeme...
https://play.google.com/about/developer-content-policy.html
If you stick both into word, that's only 16 pages of stuff to read. Don't claim to be an engineer if you can't wade through 16 pages of specs. And the relevant part for this discussion is on page 1, the 4th bullet point after "Hate Speech", "Violence & Bullying", and "Sexually Explicit Material". It's not exactly buried.
Re: Banned for Life
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
Judging by the names of the apps/wrappers (if they were same in the store) from here http://distantfutu.re/page/portfolio.html he is lucky to not get sued at the same time as well. He's even argumentative about trademark infringement in his post. I don't think he fully understands what he really did wrong.
From that website; http://distantfutu.re/page/team.html Two Founders, Two PR people and One Engineer.... Good structure :¬P
You'd think at least one of the PR people could have handled this fiasco. This would be their time to shine!
Re: Banned for Life
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lets not get into the car analogies here. Please. I don't see how wrapping that content is/was different from what Firefox does - except that firefox allows you to go to more than one webpage. This is, in my mind, a separate issue from impersonating a company.
The difference is Firefox doesn't put one app for every website it accesses in the App Store named after the website and using the websites logo.
I specifically said they were two distinct issues. He could have named the app "watch car shown online".
Re: Banned for Life
#236A lot of people think that the author deserved the punishment for his stupidity. However, I think he had an important point that needs to be discussed: that he was dismissed without a fair hearing and was banned for life from services unrelated to the one on which he committed the offense.
I think this is a growing problem that more people need to be aware of. We do not have the right to use modern marketplaces (such as the Google Play Store, Apple App Store, Google Adwords, AirBnB, Ebay, Uber, etc.) Instead, we have permission from corporations to use them. If an individual bases his livelihood on sales through one of these and then makes a mistake, the company is likely to ban him, destroying his income. There is currently no guarantee of due process or proportional punishment. When you are banned from the majority marketplace, one often has no real alternative. Can anyone make a living selling his goods on the second most popular auction site?
I think we need to fight for the right to due process and fair punishment online.
Re: Banned for Life
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does he need a license to use those images in Reunion (or wherever his server is)? It looks like it could be a fair-use under USC too? Styling yourself as DeNiro in Taxi Driver might even class as parodical and so be an allowed use? But your general point in your first clause stands.
"Fair-use" is a legal defence, when you get sued. Just like 'self-defence' is a legal defence if you murder someone. It does not mean you have the right. (Like in countries like Korea, or Australia, where you do have the right).
I'm sorry but you're quite wrong. Fair Use under the USC is an exception allowing, primarily personal [but by no means exclusively], use of otherwise copyright material. Eg fair-use covers limited educational exceptions, incidental infringements (you take a photo and it happens to have a copyright protected work in that isn't the feature of the image), etc., etc..
Fair Use is a legal defence against a claim that you have tortuously infringed someone's copyright. The reason it works is because under Fair Use exceptions there is no tort committed, that is why you get off. It's _not_ the court saying "well you committed a tort against them but it was only a small one" it's the court saying that under the USC there has been no tort committed.
If someone died whilst you were defending yourself, you don't "get off" it's ajudged to be (and considered in the relevant code or statute) acceptable, you didn't murder them. If you murdered them and you win on a legal-defence of "self-defence" then there was a miscarriage of justice.
There are many good guides, http://copyright.columbia.edu/copyright/fair-use/what-is-fai... - note in particular the penultimate para on balance. Even some commercial uses are judged "fair use" just as educational or library uses aren't always allowed. For example Google are allowed to show thousands of DeNiro images on their site under a fair use exception (eg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_10,_Inc._v._Google_Inc.).
IMO the de minimis use of single, low-pixel size, established cultural images for avatars where there is no actual commercial harm to the image maker and perceivably no commercial gain in the meets with the balanced consideration of the 4 characteristics of fair-use material.
[I've no idea where the page is hosted nor the copyright system in place in the Reunion islands (which may or may not be relevant), do they use French law, are they signatories to the Berne Convention or TRIPs???]
Re: Banned for Life
#238The author used other people's content, packaged them into an app, and then repeatedly submitted the same app (with one minor modification -- the use of someone else's content) to the Play store. 'Beta' apps or apps that you write for close friends/family can be distributed via other means than the main app market. This article admits that he ignored all of the warnings he was given, and now accuses Google of unfair…
Your position is a common response: paint the affected individual in such light that you can safely state he's different from you, and making it obvious this wouldn't possibly happen to you. The important facts, irrespective of the correctness of app suspension are: a) App suspension led to Google Wallet suspension. Google Wallet can be used as a payment processor, so this decision could have affected entirely indepe…
Relevant bit from the article:
Google explicitly states that any new accounts created by you will be immediately terminated. Google tracks everything you do. They track all the IP addresses you access your accounts from. They read your mail and track your location, they read your docs, they know your credit card numbers and home and work addresses. They also know who your friends are and who you chat with and email. It’s possible, but incredibly difficult to fool their surveillance.
His Google Music account was cancelled as well. And one could imagine, easily, Google launching a platform (Google Fraud Detection) to allow 3rd parties to determine if a developer or system is suspect--which in turn could result in blackballing for everyone.
Re: Banned for Life
#239The author used other people's content, packaged them into an app, and then repeatedly submitted the same app (with one minor modification -- the use of someone else's content) to the Play store. 'Beta' apps or apps that you write for close friends/family can be distributed via other means than the main app market. This article admits that he ignored all of the warnings he was given, and now accuses Google of unfair…
Youtube provides videos that users specifically label as a creative commons license, and are available for commercial use. He may have not been in the wrong, though it's pretty doubtful considering his questionable judgement on everything else.
Re: Banned for Life
#240The author used other people's content, packaged them into an app, and then repeatedly submitted the same app (with one minor modification -- the use of someone else's content) to the Play store. 'Beta' apps or apps that you write for close friends/family can be distributed via other means than the main app market. This article admits that he ignored all of the warnings he was given, and now accuses Google of unfair…
You're missing the nub of the issue - sure the guy made mistakes and ignored warnings. But the fact remains that he was banned by an impersonal, automated system with no chance of appeal, and as such is now effectively locked out of the entire android app ecosystem for ever - an therefore an entire possible line of business. Note there's also no possibility for him to mend his ways and be re-instated.
Imagine if the same applied to people who run physical businesses - some shop owner skips some paperwork thinking it'll be harmless, gets caught, gets a fine... and then is banned from ever owning a shop ever again for the rest of his life, no appeal.
This is our brave new cloud-oriented future - where all the power to regulate what content is available to millions of users lies in the hands of a couple of private companies. I find the whole thing very worrying, and am very glad that the FirefoxOS and Ubuntu phone projects are moving forward to provide some kind of alternative.