In response, Google suspended all their accounts, without the option to download any their stuff, including email and drive data, etc.
Additionally, Google's Terms of Service also says you own your data, including IP rights: "You retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content. In short, what belongs to you stays yours."[1] I would question if refusal to grant users access to download their own data could be considered theft.
Of course, IANAL, but if I were any of these people, I would seek the opinion a real one immediately.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine [1]http://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/terms/
The "right of first sale" means that you can't be sued (well, you can be sued but they would lose) if you sell a book you own. It doesn't say that the publisher of that book must continue to sell you additional copies or that the author won't give you a dirty look if you pass in the street or that someone may take steps that don't involve suing you for copyright infringement to discourage your activity.
This is, by the way, the same trick that powers RHEL – the binaries are all GPL, so you can totally redistribute them to anyone. If you do though, RHEL will cancel your account.
You own your data but not the servers on which that data is stored, so you can't compel Google to give you access to it, any more than you can compel me to produce your comment from my browser cache if you lose it. Refusing to give you access to their servers definitely isn't theft.
Very legal. Arguably unethical, but that's a different question.
> Under Section 4 of the Data Protection Acts, 1988 and 2003,
> you have a right to obtain a copy, clearly explained, of any
> information relating to you kept on computer or in a structured
> manual filing system or intended for such a system by any entity or organisationDon't be evil. lol.
Anyone remember the glory days of the first sale doctrine? Before we started letting companies essentially make arbitrary binding rules at their whim.
The most likely outcome is Google will settle well before trial since they know the odds are against them, and the cost to fight it (just in labor) is much more than the cost of any Pixel phone.
Google deletes artist’s blog, a decade of his work: This makes me laugh my ass off. This is a bit of a pet peeve I have with people and modern technology. They believe they have a right to use a service even though they're not paying for the usage of the service. Then they turn around shocked and angry when the free service is removed. `Why! why did they do this to me, this is the biggest injustice! How un-professional of them!`. Kind of like the dicussion I have with my collegues that `shouldn't you know.... support the open source frameworks we use to make money with?`... `Why would we do that?` ... Kind of leaves me speachless.
Take a look here, his response is actually very thoughtful:
https://www.pixartprinting.co.uk/blog/dennis-cooper-erased-b...
Sure, people should pay & support the tools they use, but there are a lot of clueless, inept people out there who have been trained by Google, Facebook, etc that everything is free.
Whatsapp with the $1 a year charge was a step in the right direction, but Facebook idiotically killed that (decent) business model. That could have made over $80 mil a month in revenue, while being a nominal amount for the average user to pay.