It's unusual for an author to post a torrent link to his own book, and so I understand that this happened, but it's an unfortunate mistake in my opinion. I hope the team will take the situation as a chance to see whether they could have handled things differently.
It's unfortunate that Google is still relying on the press/blogs as a means of elevating customer support tickets.
I know this stuff isn't easy, but I really hope some serious effort is going on to make Google better at customer support. It's a major blind spot. Automation is great, but it will never account for every possible scenario.
And yeah, Google doesn't want the overhead of such a department I get it. But there isn't even an automated solution to this. A human still has to deal with these issues, but now they have to be taken off of their normal line work to handle these cases.
The "solution" to manual or automated cusomter service is not to just get rid of customer service.
1: http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm
2: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelera...
3: http://www.kschroeder.com/my-books/ventus/free-ebook-version
http://torrentfreak.com/paulo-coelho-supports-the-pirate-bay...
Of the four examples you mentioned, the authors provided links in a wide variety of formats (ePub, HTML, TXT, Mobi), but I didn't see any torrent links. All the links I saw in a fast scan were direct download links. I think that's much more common than an author posting a link to a torrent.
1. Charles Stross (one of the four examples above) used to point readers to BitTorrent for his free book downloads: http://web.archive.org/web/20090514034859/http://www.antipop... (And he complains about automated scanners flagging legit files as copyright violations: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/11/imbecile... )
2. Unni Drougge use The Pirate bay to post a torrent of an audio version of her best-selling novel: http://www.p2p-blog.com/item-1029.html
3. Larry Lessig releases his book "Free Culture" as a torrent: http://lessig.org/blog/2004/03/free_culture_is.html (And of course, a USC student had his network account disabled for downloading this completely legal torrent: http://boingboing.net/2006/08/25/universities-put-hol.html )
4. Dan Morrill posts a torrent link to his book about selling e-books: http://torrentfreak.com/my-book-please-081017/
5. Megan Lisa Jones self-publishes a novel through BitTorrent: http://ibla.us/2011/content/thoughts-on-the-bittorrent-promo...
6. Caris O'Malley posts a pirate torrent link of his own novel and encourages readers to download it: http://hipsterlibrarian.com/2011/08/04/illegally-download-th...
7. Wired editor Chris Anderson links to a torrent search for his book "The Long Tail": http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/2007/02/books_want_to_...
(I speak from experience here. Adsense was disabled on my own site - which does about 600k page impressions a month - in late August, for some very vague reasons. I'd appeal, but I don't know what I was doing wrong, which makes fixing it rather hard. Instead, I've been working on replacing Adsense revenue with other sources - but that has its own problems.)
The problem is, when they kick you off, they don't tell you why.
We had an issue with a project I was helping someone on. Google waited until the very end of the month to terminate the account, leaving that business associate out a mid five-figure amount of $$$. It was really jarring because the traffic was legitimate. I know, because I could see good conversions coming through ad campaigns I was running.
We spent months trying to figure out why the hell the account was terminated. Finally we got a pretty good guess over what caused the termination -- something the Google account rep said was "ok." This was in writing.
The best solution right now is to personally know people who work or worked there. That's an unrealistic "fix" for 99.9% of customers.
I'm not sure if a human or a machine making the decisions is worse. What scares me most is having competitors bribe Google employees to do things that put me in an unfair position. Alternatively, Google employees who are "entrepreneurs" running stuff with inside information and power. I know from a friend that the first has happened, and we know from court cases the latter has occurred as well. Google's traffic is worth an incredible amount of money, and as long as it is this is going to be a problem.
whether google intends it or not, real people rely on google services for income, and losing this income can cause hardship.
I don't see Google having any problem with giving away your own stuff, or even giving away your stuff via torrent (despite the misleading headline here on HN). The problem is linking to TPB, which Google wants no part of.
I understand Google having actual Humans responding to their customers/publishers would be tricky due to the scale of things, but the current system seems too impersonal and I hear of these stories all the time? Not everyone has the luxury of being published in the mass media (which seems to be one of the only ways that Google will nowadays change its mind)