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Comment by Consultant32452 | Hacker News Reader

Burning books is not illegal, but we are rightfully appalled when someone publicly burns books. This is book burning.

Are you appalled if someone says "hey, I'm gonna burn any books in this box", then people put books in that box? This content is explicitly against Google's published ToS.

I would be appalled as soon as someone says "I'm gonna burn any books in this box", whether any people puts books in that box or not. It is a promise for an appalling act.

You may not like to look too closely at the book industry then. It is full of such boxes.

"Here's a box where you can put all your books in to make sure they're protected against any disaster."

"Here's also a long list of rules and conditions to this box. We know you won't read it."

"Can I get a quick rundown on what I can and can't do?"

"No."

"Alright, sounds good to me."

Fast forward 4 months:

"Hey, it looks like I'm missing a few books here, what's the deal?"

"We said you couldn't have anything about: [insert political side here], guns, chemistry, sexual acts outside of marriage."

"What, no you didn't."

"You agreed to the terms and conditions."

Thanks, Satan.

The list here:

https://support.google.com/docs/answer/148505?hl=en

has 13 items on it. Not exactly unreasonably long list to check, especially if you are in the porn industry where you should be aware that there are plenty of restrictions (justified or not) around porn. If you didn't happen to be aware of that, consider this a lesson learned the hard way.

Do you see them in this format when you sign up for Google Drive, or do you simply see one of those checkboxes that say "I have read and agree to Terms and Conditions," with a link to a huge wall of text of legalese?

I have been using Google Drive for many years and I was never aware of these restrictions. I wonder how many Drive users were aware before seeing this article. If it is less than 50% (and I would be surprised if it isn't) it is Google's fault not individual users.

> If it is less than 50% (and I would be surprised if it isn't) it is Google's fault not individual users.

This misses the second point of my parent comment; if you are in the porn industry, you should know that plenty of services do not want your business, and as such be far more diligent than the average joe in checking ToS for the services you are building your business on.

Systematic oppression makes ignoring ToS the default. Businesses choose not to cater to sex workers and such workers find themselves in the situation where there's no option but to ignore the ToS. You find that when services you take for granted aren't available, things get... harder. So you do what everyone else does to the best of your ability even if you are an "undesirable" that has been asked to stay outside the group, even when that's illegal. So yeah, sex workers are going to do what they need to do to survive and make ends meet, the terms of service for websites is the very least of their concerns when they don't know if they'll make rent this month.

Were you "aware" that two categories have been added since October? Reading the explanations, "terrorist content" seems likely to be "depictions of everyday life in poor Muslim areas". As for "public streaming", that seems to be "more downloads than we like". Regardless of what these things actually mean, there's no way to know how how much time elapsed between the additions to the document and the deletion of material.

Are you comparing books to porn? Lets go with the comparison... Nobody is burning books. It's more like the publisher is saying to aspiring author: "Your book contains pornographic content, we will not publish this. Please find another publisher. And by the way, we lost your manuscript, hope you have another one."

Well, actually they sort of do - trash the books that haven't sold.

Of course they're burning books. They're burning all manner of "indecent" content, not just this "porn" but also content about guns and other subjects they consider too taboo.

Porn == Books? I don’t understand how you can make that comparison .. and in this context.

Banning porn sounds great until you realize it means you lose HBO's The Wire, House of Cards and a long list of other iconic media because they contain scenes of sex acts and naked women in strip clubs.

There is no objective standard to distinguish them from "bad" porn.

It's legal speech. It's being destroyed because Google doesn't like the content. In this context, there's no particular difference between video and a book.

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