Rousting the book pirates from Google
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
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.
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.
Sadly that is unsurprising in a tech world that so often likes to pretend it's powerless to police its own content.
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.
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.
As the other commenter has mentioned, see how well that worked out for Youtube? People all over the Internet blame Google for the abuse of process that goes, ignoring the fact they have no choice in the matter.
> They didn't ban them enough...
Google would remove the pirated books, but not the offender's accounts, allowing them to continue selling stolen books.
>...then when they banned them, that was too much.
Google hasn't banned them. The existing pirate accounts are still in business. What Google did was stop the enrolment of all new self-publishing authors to prevent a small minority of potential new criminals. Google will take down those existing pirate accounts on an ad-hoc basis in response to complaints.
I shouldn't have had to spell this out when it is already made clear in the linked article. The contradiction really only exists in the somewhat uncharitable way you re-framed what I wrote.