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.
> "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.
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...
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.
Actually, visual incest pornography exists in the US. I am not sure why (I am within the industry, but I don't actually keep tabs on legalities that I'm not involved in), but it seems that 2 years ago VISA decided it was okay for it to take credit card payments for incest-fantasy sites, and since then there's been an explosion of mainstream studios supporting said material.
Cynically speaking, it seems to me that the adult industry is more scared of how their merchant banks will react to their content, than any chance of being taken down by the US government.
Amazing work of literature, by the way.
(I don't think Lolita should be banned anywhere. It's not a pro-pedophilia artwork.)
> Cooper used the blog to post his fiction, research, and visual art, and as Artforum explains, it was also “a platform through which he engaged almost daily with a community of followers and fellow artists.” His latest GIF novel (as the term suggests, a novel constructed with animated GIFs) was also mostly saved to the blog.
This is something that current day harassment laws (and in some countries slander laws) already cover.
https://books.google.com/books/about/Lolita.html?id=TOQxAgAA...
The Supreme Court define obscenity as being a work that was reasonably lude by the standards of the day, and lacked "serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value." Lolita doesn't really fit this description due to its literary and artistic value.
I haven't read the blog in question, but obviously issues like this are trickier to decide with contemporary artists that are unestablished. Google certainly doesn't want to be labeled as being a distributor of child pornography, and you can't really compare some guy's blog to a book like Lolita.
Hell, I've hosted most of my personal domains' email accounts via Google. A few months ago one of them was deleted. I never really used the email, but I certainly had things on their I would like to have for posterity. When Google deleted the account I was given no recourse or ability to appeal. It was just gone. It's not as if the account was even anything controversial, it was just my contact-me email for an old NES modding site I had.
You can rest assured, if it was child porn, they'd be obligued to keep backups as proof for law enforcement. I doubt the material is actually deleted, just hidden until they sort it out with the feds.
This may be an intentional decision to cooperate with law enforcement. If they only go silent in the case of ongoing investigations, then "Google went silent" functions in the same way as "the warrant canary disappeared" does for other sites, which could in theory jeopardize an investigation.
That's what you get for not making backups. This isn't rocket science. You're using someone else's free service, and they have zero obligation to continue to provide that service to you. Even if they didn't intentionally delete your account, mistakes do happen sometimes. Who actually thinks it's a good idea to keep only one copy of data that you value? Especially on a site with the name "Hacker News"? Do hackers these days not understand backups?