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Banned for Life

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Re: Banned for Life

#271

Post by mattstocum »

wolfgke wrote: post #130
mattstocum wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He was warned. Repeatedly. What the hell else did he want? An overt act of divine intervention?

What he wanted is stated clearly in the article: "I emailed Google back and asked them to tell me exactly what I need to change to be compliant with the rules. Is it the icon? The name? The disclaimer? What? Google refused to give me any additional information. So, I just left the app in the suspended state and never attempted to update it since I really didn’t know what I needed to change".

And that's all well and good, until you read the rest of the chain of events leading up to that. He had an app suspended, and was given a clear reason why ("The suspension email stated that I was trying to impersonate another company, and that this was forbidden"). Whether or not he agreed with the logic is immaterial. Then a second app gets suspended for the same reason. Any sane individual would take the rest down at this point. It's clear Google considered what he was doing a violation of their rules. But he just kept on trucking a long.

God had already sent him two boats, waiting for the helicopter is the act of a mad man.

Re: Banned for Life

#272

Post by mattstocum »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #254
therobot24 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

he probably factored in all the time he spent learning to build the first app, and then multiplied it by 10...if he's an independent developer i'd be very hesitant to contract him given his poor billing techniques

On the other hand I would be quite hesitant to hire a developer to build a customized video player for tens of thousands of dollars if he was going to go on and sell that same code to others for $200 a pop.

Neither approach is right. There's nothing wrong with the write-once sell-many approach, that's basically all of non-custom software development. You shouldn't be charging for your time to learn, either. His 10 apps aren't worth $500,000 in any universe. Maybe you could argue that the entirety of the development was worth $50,000 and value each app at $5000. Maybe. I wouldn't argue that, but someone else could...

Re: Banned for Life

#273

Post by mattstocum »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #270
Eiriksmal wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"A few weeks went by and I got an email stating one of my apps had been suspended. ... I could understand if an uptight lawyer out there didn’t want my app on the store displaying their videos." "The suspension email stated that I was trying to impersonate another company, and that this was forbidden. I had no intention of impersonating anyone." I would say, in this gentleman's situation, that's pretty specific. Espe…

There were no copyright issues here, only trademark / impersonation. Those rules are extremely fuzzy, and the usual method of mentioning a trademark you don't own, practiced even by mega-corporations, is by attaching a disclaimer that it's not their trademark.

Except Google clearly told him that his actions violated the rules. This isn't even a trademark issue. There has been no legal action taken against him. This is a rules issue, and the sole arbiter of those rules told him he was breaking them, twice, before banning him. Can you blame Google for banning him? If he didn't get the message after the first two warnings, why would you expect him to get it after the 20th.

Re: Banned for Life

#274

Post by Renaud »

cookiecaper wrote: post #143
Renaud wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On top of that, you can only use a .re TLD if you are a EU citizen or a company that resides in the EU... http://www.afnic.fr/en/products-and-services/the-re-tld/

This is pretty unfair. It's super common to get country TLDs just because they make your service or site sound cooler. I think it's well-accepted that such rules are meaningless at this point.

They shouldn't be. When we registered a .re TLD we were asked to provide a business license to prove that the business in question was local. Desirable local TLDs get taken by squatters and opening them to the world at large dilutes the meaningfulness and availability of that TLD to local businesses who need the recognition.

Re: Banned for Life

#275

Post by mark-r »

Regardless of how you feel about this particular case, there are two things that are troubling:

1. Google is big enough to be an indispensable part of your life.

2. Google doesn't believe in allowing human contact - it doesn't scale. They've put all their eggs into the algorithm basket, and when the algorithm decides you're guilty that's it. No appeal, at least not in any real sense.

It's a story that gets repeated over and over.

Re: Banned for Life

#276

Post by einrealist »

ascendantlogic wrote: post #18
_petronius wrote: post #2

The 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…

The only thing I side with him on is this: "I emailed Google back and asked them to tell me exactly what I need to change to be compliant with the rules. Is it the icon? The name? The disclaimer? What? Google refused to give me any additional information." If you ask why, you should be told exactly what is wrong. Or better yet, be told exactly what is wrong right away. Obviously packaging other people's content is th…

Google does not do that, because it could bite them if they do and if this goes to court.

Re: Banned for Life

#278

Post by tripzilch »

It's pretty clear to me.

First, what the guy did was wrong, and he appears pretty stupid, pretending to be stupid, or both.

Google is generally known for their abysmal communication and "customer service", but in this case they were in fact pretty clear about the problem right when the first app got suspended.

He can whine all he want but Google's decision to ban his Android developer account was not too unreasonable.

However even with that in mind I do believe that they went completely overboard with the decisions to also ban-for-life his Google Wallet and Google Music accounts. Those are completely unrelated to this matter[0], and escalated this thing out of proportion.

It is kind of frightening they will just take those things as "collateral" for violating a bunch of rules on a completely different service that just also happens to be part of the Google ecosystem. It starts to become and look like a state that way (hello, cyberpunk future), but with a state you should also have clear rules and ways of appeal. Google definitely doesn't have a meaningful version the the latter.

People depend on all sorts of services that Google provides, and the ability to take all or any of them away (there are no laws) because you violated an unrelated rule, is an amount of power that should come with mechanisms that keep it in check.

Indeed what if they instead had taken his GMail account?

[0] unless there is more that the author is not telling us, which is not at all unlikely.

Re: Banned for Life

#279

Post by tripzilch »

wolfgke wrote: post #22
icebraining wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rule is explicit: it's called trademark law. You can't just copy the name and logo of another company, append " TV" and distribute it publicly. This is an official app of The Verge: http://www.myappwiz.com/home/getapp?platform=Ios&appID=54251... This is OP's unofficial app: http://www.myappwiz.com/home/getapp?platform=Android&appID=c... It's pretty clear that this is prone to cause confusion, even with the discla…

Quotes from the article: "I emailed Google back and asked them to tell me exactly what I need to change to be compliant with the rules. Is it the icon? The name? The disclaimer? What? Google refused to give me any additional information. So, I just left the app in the suspended state and never attempted to update it since I really didn’t know what I needed to change" "Why didn’t you give the apps a different name? We…

But the initial app suspension email from Google did say he was violating trademark.

Re: Banned for Life

#280

Post by TuringTest »

danielweber wrote: post #43
TuringTest wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question is, was the punishment proportional to the crime? The 'whine' was about being banned for life because of novice mistakes made without bad faith. How is one supposed to learn the ropes? It's like learning to drive in a country where driving schools didn't exist and the full extent of traffic laws applied to you. How possibly could the author learn what he was doing wrong?

The majority of the post was "it's their fault that they didn't stop me!" When his first app was suspended, Google should have given a better response when he asked what he did wrong. But to just continue forward doing the exact same thing he was doing before was asking for trouble. If Google wouldn't give him a clear answer, he should have asked his friends or the community.

According to the timeline, all the applications that got his account suspended were already in place when he got the first notice. So it's not as if he continued doing the same thing - he was sacked by inaction, and the warnings didn't contain sufficient notice that more action (removing the other applications, which hadn't got a warning yet) was required on his part.
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