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Comment by mcherm | Hacker News Reader

This again points out the REAL problem with customer relations that companies like Google have. I would have no objection if Google banned him, then he appealed, explaining the situation, and they reinstated him. But since Google fails to provide a WAY to communicate to a human and appeal a situation, it leads to absurd outcomes like this one.

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If the user had linked to a torrent hosted on its own domain, and the Adsense user got banned for it, then I'd call it an absurd outcome. Now I see a user who probably didn't read/understand/or forgot the Adsense policy. This was no false positive, if you follow the letter:

  AdSense program policies

  Publishers may not place AdSense code on pages with content
  that violates any of our content guidelines.

  Sites with Google ads may not include or link to:

  - Hacking/cracking content
  - Any other content that is illegal, promotes illegal 
  activity or infringes on the legal rights of others

Linking to The Pirate Bay or Demonoid could be in violation of above, regardless of whether you wrote the book or not.

I wonder if the same holds for organic search and that it could hurt your rankings. If Google deemed The Pirate Bay a "bad neighborhood", their Webmaster Guidelines seem to say so:

  Linking schemes can be:
  - Links to web spammers or bad neighborhoods on the web

I don't expect Google to follow my links to a shady domain, check if the torrent is a lone non-infringing Linux distro, or one of the many other infringing torrents on The Pirate Bay. That might be possible though.

EDIT: http://python-ebook.blogspot.nl/ if the links appeared in the sidebar, like the new link to a self-hosted torrent, it meant that two links to a bad neighborhood were on every page of that website, not just a lone link.

  "Why? Because they claimed he was distributing copyrighted
  content illegally." - Techdirt

But quoted just below is the Google email with the claim:

  "Violation explanation
  ... as well as providing links for ... sites that contain
  copyrighted material."

Perhaps the wording could use some fine-tuning (sites that contain copyright-infringing material) and match the specific violation more closely. But is this Google failing to communicate? Or an Adsense user failing to follow the rules and failing to understand the, still pretty clear, feedback. At least I find the title "Google disables AdSense account of user for sharing free book via torrent" not factually true and rather sensationalist.

No, it was a false-positive (few people think he should be banned for using Pirate Bay LEGALLY for distribution), but not a "bad" false-positive. Google's initial banning was reasonable. But providing no effective way to contest this (other than getting noticed on HackerNews or TechDirt) is the REAL problem.

The Adsense account was positively banned for linking to the Pirate Bay and Demonoid (sites that host infringing content and cracks) on every page of the site.

Then the Adsense account holder contested and received a positive explanation of: You offered links to pages on content-infringing domains.

No one, not even Google, wants to ban, or did ever ban, Adsense accounts, simply because the account holder used the Pirate Bay to distribute free stuff it owns the rights to.

I totally agree that there is a problem with the support channels. To me the REAL problem is: user breaking the rules, contesting, getting feedback about which rule he broke (the linking part), finally deleting the links, contesting shortly after again, account didn't get reinstated immediately, so user goes to the media and they twist it into an unavoidable, bad PR story of Google mistaking this guy for a distributor of copyright infringing material and offering no explanation or recourse.

As an aside: The Pirate Bay is inaccessible to many Dutch ISP users, when the courts deemed that the site mainly exists to facilitate copyright infringement.

"sites that host infringing content"

Since when does Piratebay host any infringing content? There's only links to infringing content. Google also links to infringing content.

Yeah man, thousands of paedophiles just love Google.

Thankfully, the Hacker News front page doubles as a Google Customer Service Department quite well. We recommend you use inflammatory titles to expedite your case.

>We recommend you use inflammatory titles to expedite your case.

No "we" don't.

It does appear to be a form of rewarded behavior, so there is an implicit approval.

I agree completely ... unless you get on the front page of HN and one of the Googlers here (e.g. @Matt_Cutts) notices, you probably won't find anyone to help you.

I'm not sure why people keep saying this. Google provides tech support forums, which are responded to by Google employees.

Amazon is the same way. I don't understand why so many people base their entire businesses on companies that don't even give them any kind of real support...especially when you are making them money.

What problems have you had with Amazon? Whenever I've had problems with AWS, they replied promptly.

Personally I know that I've had a couple inquiries about my AWS account get ignored and the one that finally got an answer came after I had given up and done what I wanted elsewhere.

Are you on paid support with an SLA?

You can argue that the price of support is too high to be worthwhile, but that's different from saying they don't provide support.

Honestly? Not having to deal with support ranks slightly above dealing with support and having a great outcome. I suspect I'm not alone on this.

I've never had to return anything to Amazon or raise a support issue with Google (at least on their free products).

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