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Comment by rsync | Hacker News Reader

Have your lawyer write a letter.

As in, a real legal demand with a complaint attached that is addressed to their counsel and includes estimates of monetary damages and alludes (not threatens) to the specific jurisdiction and court it would be submitted to for adjudication.

Send copies of this letter, by registered/certified mail, to several contacts.

They will have to respond to this and these responses will be expensive.

If you are in the right - even marginally so - your account will get fixed because it will be much too expensive to continue to ignore you.

Filling in web forms and emailing form addresses costs google nothing. It makes perfect sense that these actions (appear) to have identical results as doing nothing.

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> They will have to respond to this

Why? If they think they have the right to terminate your account, and you have no standing, why would you expect them not to ignore your lawyer in the very same way they ignore you?

Taking this to court might get their attention, but you also have to show grounds for why you get to override their decision. IANAL, but I don't see why Google isn't allowed to just say "nope, you're outta here" to anyone it damned well wants. Sucks, but it's their reputation to ruin.

> > They will have to respond to this

> Why?

They don't have to respond to the demand letter, but they do have to respond if a lawsuit if one is filed. If they don't, it's a default judgement for the plaintiff. (This is one of the things that is broken in the American legal system. You can force someone to spend a lot of money by suing them even if your complaint has no merit.)

So while they don't have to respond to a credible threat of a lawsuit, it would be prudent for them to do so because otherwise there is a real risk for them of having it cost a lot more.

How is it broken to require a defendant to respond to a lawsuit?

Because an innocent person can be bankrupted by repeatedly having to respond to frivolous lawsuits.

Can anyone find an example of that actually happening?

Not bankruptcy but this type of abuse? Sure:

https://dailyillini.com/news-stories/2013/04/26/suburban-exp...

He would intentionally file lawsuits in another county because he knew it's too much of a burden for many students to travel there for court hearings. Students just settle even if they think they're completely innocent.

I discussed this very particular issue with my friend who is an attorney, he mentioned that you can't actually abuse the system with frivolous lawsuits. Judges will start throwing your cases out and you can be disciplined by the BAR.

At the same you don’t think google is big enough to hire lawyers to file n-1 the amount to get fined or punished frivolous lawsuits against you and keep rotating lawyers?

No, because at n=3 the the judge will say “if you file another one of these, I’ll fine you $1,000,000, and Sundar better be here at 9:00 a.m. tomorrow so I can explain it to him personally.”

Courts and judges aren’t something to be truffled with.

So then a different google subsidiary with no clear connections will file the suit next. Also if google wants to do something or ruin someone a few million dollar fine isn't going to deter them one bit

Not that concept, just our specific implementation.

If person A decides they don't like you, they can sue you over and over and cost you tens of thousands of dollars and never get that back. If you don't reply to each with a lawyer and spend time and money fighting, you lose even more money.

There are some bandaids like having someone declared a vexatious litigant, but that also requires time and money. If you owned some small business, someone could certainly bankrupt you before you could stop them.

I don't know exactly what a solution looks like, but I do see this as a problem.

If person A decides they don't like you, they can sue you over and over and cost you tens of thousands of dollars and never get that back.

As an attorney, I’ve never even heard of that actually happening - other than prisoner litigation.

Moreover, a judge will order someone to stop filing cases if they are bringing frivolous claims, and can hold them in contempt if they do.

IANAL but my guess is that it costs money for the defendant to respond to a lawsuit, so if company A wants person B to stop doing something, even if person B is within their legal right to do so, company A can still force person B to stop, because either person B goes bankrupt fighting it or person B ignores it and company A has the judgement in their favor.

Because (if I understand correctly) the judge side with the plaintiff without looking at the case : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default_judgment.

It's not prudent unless it's likely to both happen and succeed.

Not only is "I'll sue you" often just bluster, if they already think they're in the right —and I'm yet to understand that they're not— they'll be betting that you're not actually going to risk paying their legal fees to make a faulty argument in court.

In making that bet, only lose out by having their legal team engage with you. That's expensive. In a low risk scenario, it's easier and cheaper to wait until it actually counts.

> you're not actually going to risk paying their legal fees to make a faulty argument in court.

In the U.S. a losing plaintiff does not pay the defendant's legal fees unless the lawsuit is deemed to be frivolous, which hardly ever happens.

Which i think is a failure of the system - it makes some court cases that would be ruled in favour of the "small guy" to not take place instead, which makes the "big guy" win by default.

The US should adopt a small claims courts system which costs less (like a copyright small claims etc), which would admit frivolous DMCA take downs etc, as well as cases like these. And amend the damages awarded to include fees incurred as part of the case.

There are small-claims courts, but the limit on what you can sue for there is typically <$10k. Not enough if your entire livelihood is at stake, as it is in this case.

"It's not prudent unless it's likely to both happen and succeed."

No, that is incorrect - there is an asymmetry here which is (oddly) in the ops favor.

Paying my lawyer (for instance) to create and send a letter like this, etc., might cost me $3-800. Properly responding to it and covering all the bases and carrying out ones legal duties vis a vis google might cost 5x that.

... and the letter writer will be dealing with an entirely different operation at google. Real people will be considering the case.

Costs aside, you're still weighing up "the case", like it's a definite, or that by responding to a legal letter, that it's definitely not. In real life it's neither of those things.

Very few people actually litigate unless they have very strong grounds on well trodden rights. I'm trying to establish any grounds in other comments, but any lawyer looking to litigate this is going to have to warn to their clients that they're not going to win against Goliath. When you're dealing with a family that's just lost its only income, hiring a lawyer is even more unlikely.

And even if Google reads and responds with the best letter, solid reasons, the bulk of a real legal defence, short of some backtracking or a large payoff, there's no reason the devs wouldn't go on to sue.

For a case which would take a junior and a massive pile of existing case law and afternoon to dismiss, I don't see that making a new penpal here helps Google. It might be ten times the amount to read and respond to a letter, but it's twenty times less likely to happen.

And as I was recently reminded, Google's legal cost is sunk. Those lawyers are salaried Google employees. The cost to put them on this case for the ten minutes it'd take to defend is only measurable in what else they could be doing for Google.

> they do have to respond if a lawsuit if one is filed. If they don't, it's a default judgement for the plaintiff.

Google's response will be very cheap for them, compared to the cost for the plaintiff (meaning, as a percentage of their respective incomes): that they have no legal obligation to provide the plaintiff any services whatever, and that the terms of service for the Google service the plaintiff was using clearly state that Google can terminate the account whenever it wants. Google's lawyers probably have a template for such a response all ready to go. The cost of this to Google won't even be rounding error in their financials.

I agree.

These aren't the first people Google has denied service to. They have defended this right before. They're not going up lose.

And Google has a salaried team of lawyers. This is a sunk cost. This case will cost them no more.

> and you have no standing,

How - how! - can you justify the statement that you have "no standing" when your income stream was arbitrarily cut off with no explanation?

> IANAL, but I don't see why Google isn't allowed to just say "nope, you're outta here" to anyone it damned well wants.

Because it's wildly unfair and morally abhorrent?

Google isn't an employer or a landlord here, they were the developers' agent (according to the distribution agreement). They simply exercised their rights to stop representing them. The developers have no expectation of representation or service when it's directly against Google's express will.

There are so many transferable analogies here, but your wild and moral handwaving aside, I'm yet to hear why Google should have to let these developers sell through Google's marketplace, on Google's dime. If you put all your eggs into one big Google-shaped basket, your livelihood exists (and ends) at the whim of Google. Same applies to all the Apple devs this has happened to. And that's the developers' fault.

I think you might argue that's unfair, you might argue that Google and Apple's and Valve's (etc) marketplaces should be classed as public utility services, and that the public should have access —and I might agree with you— but that's not currently the case.

It's Google's ball and they're taking it home.

You can send Google a hundred "legal demands" (whatever that means), but they have no reason or obligation to reply to any of them.

You can sue them over it, but a company of that scale handles literally hundreds of lawsuits a day. Almost all of them are frivolous, and will be dismissed.

This is the correct answer to the situation.

It might seem like a "correct" answer, but it's not, because it won't accomplish anything. Google has orders of magnitude more money and resources to fight a lawsuit than any individual plaintiff does. This particular plaintiff is not the first, or even the thousandth, to have this problem and find that it's not fixable.

The only really correct answer to the root problem here is for developers to stop using Google Play as a distribution channel. There is more than enough data out there by now to make it crystal clear that everyone who does that is doing so at the mercy of Google's whim. No sane person should be trying to build an actual business that will provide income they and their families depend on on such a shaky foundation.

> The only really correct answer to the root problem here is for developers to stop using Google Play as a distribution channel.

But Google has deliberately made it essentially impossible to do this.

1. The user needs to discover that other app ecosystems even exist. 2. They will then need to jailbreak their phone. 3. This voids their warranty.

That eliminates 99+% of your customer base off the top.

And of course Google could and likely would refuse advertisements for these alternative app ecosystems.

> Google has deliberately made it essentially impossible to do this.

No, users have made it essentially impossible to do this.

In other words: the majority of users don't care about the problems of developers. They just want apps without having to think about where they come from, and the simplest way to do that is to use Google Play if they have an Android phone.

That's not a Google problem. That's a user problem. If it's indeed a problem. And the way for developers to fix it, if it needs to be fixed, is to not give users apps if users insist on only using Google Play. Make it so users have to go elsewhere to get apps at all, because developers refuse to "play" on Google Play, so there aren't any apps there. Then users will be on the same side as developers, and there are a lot more users.

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