Banned for Life | Hacker News Reader

Banned for Life

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316 pointslubomir285 comments

The author used other people's content, packaged them into an app, and then repeatedly submitted the same app (with one minor modification -- the use of someone else's content) to the Play store. 'Beta' apps or apps that you write for close friends/family can be distributed via other means than the main app market.

This article admits that he ignored all of the warnings he was given, and now accuses Google of unfair business practice. I don't buy it.

There's a lot of logical contortion going on to dump the blame for this back on Google. "The suspension email stated that I was trying to impersonate another company" is followed quickly by "Well since Google was silent about the exact reason for suspension..."; he even admits to intentionally ignoring the warnings he was given because "if I thought a human at Google was giving me the warning, I might have listened more carefully."

That is, at best, negligently poor reasoning. At worst, it's a contemptuous disrespect for the other party you're engaging in business with, which is pretty good grounds for them exercising their option to terminate that business relationship.

Google, Amazon, etc., are for-profit commercial service providers. If you're going to violate their policies, they will stop working with you, regardless of the impact on your business. Anyone who depends on a third party supplier for anything, in any business context, should keep that in mind -- they have no duty to you beyond whatever contract you have signed (if, of course, you have signed one).

Judging by the names of the apps/wrappers (if they were same in the store) from here http://distantfutu.re/page/portfolio.html he is lucky to not get sued at the same time as well. He's even argumentative about trademark infringement in his post. I don't think he fully understands what he really did wrong.

Agreed - the whole thing reads like a giant whine, to me. The author has zero concept of what he's done wrong, which is astounding to me.

The question is, was the punishment proportional to the crime?

The 'whine' was about being banned for life because of novice mistakes made without bad faith. How is one supposed to learn the ropes? It's like learning to drive in a country where driving schools didn't exist and the full extent of traffic laws applied to you. How possibly could the author learn what he was doing wrong?

How is one supposed to learn the ropes?

Maybe listen to one of the many warnings he was given?

Warning, your post is in breech of my policies, the policies of HN, the law local to you or some other policy that applies due to jurisdiction that applies to the server, you, me or HN.

Please correct this error immediately or your account will be terminated. /s

The majority of the post was "it's their fault that they didn't stop me!"

When his first app was suspended, Google should have given a better response when he asked what he did wrong. But to just continue forward doing the exact same thing he was doing before was asking for trouble. If Google wouldn't give him a clear answer, he should have asked his friends or the community.

His friends consisted of "99.9% of everyone I know uses iOS", are probably contemptuous of Android. Which seems to be a common attitude amongst the apple fanbois. I don't think his friends could've helped him.

According to the timeline, all the applications that got his account suspended were already in place when he got the first notice. So it's not as if he continued doing the same thing - he was sacked by inaction, and the warnings didn't contain sufficient notice that more action (removing the other applications, which hadn't got a warning yet) was required on his part.

> The question is, was the punishment proportional to the crime?

Well yeah, repeated trademark infringement / impersonation; if Google wasn't strict about that kinda thing, the owners of those brands would sue them for millions, just as much as they were with Youtube. They're similarly strict with Youtube videos for that matter.

"Khan Academy TV - youtube.com/user/khanacademy"

Is that impersonation? Basically his app let you have a "bookmark" that opened a YouTube provided channel.

Sure he seems to be naive about the trademark issues (but interestingly never mentions how much money was made, if any) but Google were highly flawed in their customer service/developer relations [as usual]. The trademark issue isn't entirely clear cut (but I wouldn't want to try and defend it in court) as it's descriptive of what it is. There's an exhaustion of rights angle too - like being able to sell Nike shoes and call them Nike shoes as long as they are really from Nike. My point I suppose is it's not entirely without complexity.

Google, how hard is it to have a pro forma response that says "You can not use other business names or trademarks, which you don't have a license for, as part of your app name.".

To continue your analogy, it would be more akin to selling Nike shoes in your store, and calling your store Nike Store Seller, and using Nike's logo prominently in your store.

I'm sure Nike wouldn't like that, even if you were actually selling Nike shoes.

I agree that Google wasn't exactly communicative (they never are).

Wouldn't it more like having a Nike stand in a store called Google's Play App Store, with a small sign noting "this is not an official Nike stand"? (the developers name and notice).

I understand that Nike wouldn't want the unauthorized usage, but an app is a product, not a store.

Yeah, it would be more like a stand, with a huge Nike logo, and the small sign :) ( "this is not an official Nike stand").

What the developer did is hardly unique, my GF was looking for a Prezi app yesterday, and she almost installed an unofficial app, which looked really official (like the original author's, it says "This is unofficial app."):

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.andromo.de...

I have never submitted anything to Google Play, but there has to be some sort of guidelines for what you can submit and not?

Or he could have just searched the web - "(...) searching the web I find dozens of similar stories"

There is a guide and it's pretty clear: https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...

"For example, if your app displays the brand, icon, or title from another app [...] your apps can be suspended and your developer account terminated."

I was trying to feel some kind of sympathy for the guy and though that maybe the terms and conditions may have been full of jargon and hard for someone without a legal background to understand. That's about as clear as can be.

There was no crime (at least no criminal prosecution of one form or another) and no punishment. There was a violation of the contract the OP agreed upon and the other party decided to make use of their right and terminate that contract. That other party has no obligation whatsoever to continue to uphold the contract or not make use of the clause which allows them to exit. The other party is also under no obligation to provide someone some leeway to “learn the ropes”. Lastly, the ropes which the author failed to learn are founded in civil and criminal law, not in the ToS of the other party specifically. Since ignorance of the law is not a valid excuse to violate said law, there is particularly little reason for anyone to give the OP any sort of leeway to learn obeying the law.

TL;DR: Don’t trust companies with important stuff if you are not certain to have appropriate forms of recourse if they decide in a way you don’t like. Don’t ignore civil and criminal law because they’re just “rules”. Read the terms of service if you agree to them.

It's a misrepresentation to cast the account suspension as if it was a punishment for a crime.

Google has the right to terminate a business relationship with partners who violate their terms and conditions and ignore their warnings.

Developer account with Google is not a birthright. The provision of it is a business relationship conditioned on following certain rules which the author broke multiple times and despite warnings.

He was warned. Repeatedly. What the hell else did he want? An overt act of divine intervention?

What he wanted is stated clearly in the article:

"I emailed Google back and asked them to tell me exactly what I need to change to be compliant with the rules. Is it the icon? The name? The disclaimer? What? Google refused to give me any additional information. So, I just left the app in the suspended state and never attempted to update it since I really didn’t know what I needed to change".

My beef with this article is that he knew something was wrong, hence his questions basically asking, "Which of my many actions violated copyright law?" And tattles on himself when he admits everything about his "app" revolved around unfair use of others' copyrighted material: "I 'borrowed' your icon and your name when I created my 'app.' Is that wrong?"

If you tell me I've done 'something' wrong I can make an enormous series of increasingly-tenuous possible justifications in my mind, but that doesn't mean I have any clue if I've actually done something wrong or if there was a mistake in evaluation somewhere.

"A few weeks went by and I got an email stating one of my apps had been suspended. ... I could understand if an uptight lawyer out there didn’t want my app on the store displaying their videos."

"The suspension email stated that I was trying to impersonate another company, and that this was forbidden. I had no intention of impersonating anyone." I would say, in this gentleman's situation, that's pretty specific. Especially since he admits above, below, and all around his Google correspondence that he's got a very good understanding that what he's doing violates either US copyright law or Google's terms of services, regardless of intent.

"You, sir, are in violation of copyright law. What? You didn't intend to violate copyright law and have a "disclaimer" in your app? Oh, well in that case..."

There were no copyright issues here, only trademark / impersonation. Those rules are extremely fuzzy, and the usual method of mentioning a trademark you don't own, practiced even by mega-corporations, is by attaching a disclaimer that it's not their trademark.

Except Google clearly told him that his actions violated the rules. This isn't even a trademark issue. There has been no legal action taken against him. This is a rules issue, and the sole arbiter of those rules told him he was breaking them, twice, before banning him. Can you blame Google for banning him? If he didn't get the message after the first two warnings, why would you expect him to get it after the 20th.

Some developers have a serious problem with understanding that there are times when an app's problems aren't about checkboxes on an issue tracker. The entire spirit of this app is about infringing on intellectual property rights. Furthermore, the app is so basic that it provides zero value to simply bookmarking the YouTube channel in your browser. The entire concept is so terrible that he had to hide behind an appeal to emotion (i.e., "b-bu-but my kids needed it!") just to sell it.

"Maybe I'm naive" is truly the understatement of the century here. This guy credential-izes himself out the ass (developer since 1991!), yet still can't grasp the concept of copyright infringement? At a certain point, you, as an adult, need to learn to swim or stay 20ft away from large bodies of water. This guy belly-flopped right in and dropped straight to the bottom. Then, Google pulled him out and he went right for the diving board again. This guy was clearly hopeless from Google's perspective and in no way worth the trouble he would cause (assuming that this is truly naivety and not some sort of sympathy trolling). Good riddance.

What astounds me -- I think -- is his honesty. He overstates and overestimates his value... but... he wrote it as it is.

I read his account and think he is a goddamn idiot... basically a self-indulgent, petulant child. I think it shows a profound disconnect with reality, he legitimately thought that if he told the story... people would be on his side.

I am deeply curious about his mental state... he considers himself victimize, he considers disclaimers meaningful, he really can't understand why people would take offense at his shallow, low value wrapper trading off the names and content of other people.

>The entire spirit of this app is about infringing on intellectual property rights.

How is this true in any sense? Adding a frame around a YouTube channel is basically an RSS reader.

The value is that you now have an icon on your home screen instead of having to go through a browser. That's valuable. I value that. I'd use that app.

And that's all well and good, until you read the rest of the chain of events leading up to that. He had an app suspended, and was given a clear reason why ("The suspension email stated that I was trying to impersonate another company, and that this was forbidden"). Whether or not he agreed with the logic is immaterial. Then a second app gets suspended for the same reason. Any sane individual would take the rest down at this point. It's clear Google considered what he was doing a violation of their rules. But he just kept on trucking a long.

God had already sent him two boats, waiting for the helicopter is the act of a mad man.

>The question is, was the punishment proportional to the crime?

Yes.

>The 'whine' was about being banned for life because of novice mistakes made without bad faith. How is one supposed to learn the ropes?

The novice mistakes were made without bad faith, I agree. This is why his first app was suspended.

The reason he was banned however, was continuing to ignore warnings. He has no concept of what he did wrong—he's not someone I would want to do business with, either.

If one person does it, it's a whine. When Airbnb or Uber does it, it's fighting back against the establishment.

Not suggesting he was right, but you can't be apart of this community without noticing these things.

On top of that, you can only use a .re TLD if you are a EU citizen or a company that resides in the EU...

http://www.afnic.fr/en/products-and-services/the-re-tld/

This is pretty unfair. It's super common to get country TLDs just because they make your service or site sound cooler. I think it's well-accepted that such rules are meaningless at this point.

They shouldn't be. When we registered a .re TLD we were asked to provide a business license to prove that the business in question was local. Desirable local TLDs get taken by squatters and opening them to the world at large dilutes the meaningfulness and availability of that TLD to local businesses who need the recognition.

There are companies that will set up a local shell company for you to own whatever TLD you want.

Here's a copy of the app information, copied by some app discovering site: http://www.myappwiz.com/home/getapp?platform=Android&appID=c...

Technically it's a very nice idea. I'd love to, say, funnel my younger son into the Schoolhouse Rock channel without him going off and watching teenagers swear at Angry Birds.

But he completely botched the execution.

he used their logo too? That is just wrong. the OP seems like a naive developer who doesn't grasp even the basics of trademarks and if he does then he has complete disregard for them and should be banned for life.

Copyright and trademarks don't seem to be his strength, I doubt that he licensed the pictures on http://distantfutu.re/page/team.html .. But because he grew up "in the 70s/80s", these are public domain to him.

Does he need a license to use those images in Reunion (or wherever his server is)? It looks like it could be a fair-use under USC too? Styling yourself as DeNiro in Taxi Driver might even class as parodical and so be an allowed use?

But your general point in your first clause stands.

"Fair-use" is a legal defence, when you get sued. Just like 'self-defence' is a legal defence if you murder someone.

It does not mean you have the right. (Like in countries like Korea, or Australia, where you do have the right).

US Copyright "Fair Use" is basically a statutory exception that closely follows the parameters of what courts found were Constitutional limits on copyright restrictions imposed by the First Amendment free speech/free press rights, so, no, despite the fact that it is procedurally a statutory exception, it also does reflect the existence of a more basic right that the statute would have no power to infringe even if it didn't encode the exception explicitly.

I'm sorry but you're quite wrong. Fair Use under the USC is an exception allowing, primarily personal [but by no means exclusively], use of otherwise copyright material. Eg fair-use covers limited educational exceptions, incidental infringements (you take a photo and it happens to have a copyright protected work in that isn't the feature of the image), etc., etc..

Fair Use is a legal defence against a claim that you have tortuously infringed someone's copyright. The reason it works is because under Fair Use exceptions there is no tort committed, that is why you get off. It's _not_ the court saying "well you committed a tort against them but it was only a small one" it's the court saying that under the USC there has been no tort committed.

If someone died whilst you were defending yourself, you don't "get off" it's ajudged to be (and considered in the relevant code or statute) acceptable, you didn't murder them. If you murdered them and you win on a legal-defence of "self-defence" then there was a miscarriage of justice.

There are many good guides, http://copyright.columbia.edu/copyright/fair-use/what-is-fai... - note in particular the penultimate para on balance. Even some commercial uses are judged "fair use" just as educational or library uses aren't always allowed. For example Google are allowed to show thousands of DeNiro images on their site under a fair use exception (eg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_10,_Inc._v._Google_Inc.).

IMO the de minimis use of single, low-pixel size, established cultural images for avatars where there is no actual commercial harm to the image maker and perceivably no commercial gain in the meets with the balanced consideration of the 4 characteristics of fair-use material.

[I've no idea where the page is hosted nor the copyright system in place in the Reunion islands (which may or may not be relevant), do they use French law, are they signatories to the Berne Convention or TRIPs???]

Apologises, I was a bit flippant, I merely meant fair-use wasn't a 'right'. It was instead a 'defence'. Saying it was like self-defence, was incorrect. You are correct.

But my point is, it is unlike other countries where it is a right (i.e. you cannot be taken to court at all for it).

This is not fair use. No court has ever held that it's fair use to reproduce copyright images because you think they look cool, you think they're funny, you think they illustrate some point you're trying to make, etc. And using an image of DeNiro as your avatar does not even begin to approach a legally acceptable form of parody.

Just because hardly anybody ever gets sued for using copyrighted images as avatars, as humorous blog illustrations, and so on, doesn't mean that they couldn't be sued — and the copyright holder would unquestionably prevail.

Using the US courts 4-factor analysis where in particular do you think this use - of a low-pixel screencap transformed as an avatar - fails?

Do you happen to know the jurisdiction applicably here, as it's behind Cloudfront the location of the servers are hidden. Clearly there's the .re domain. It might be considered that Cloudfront's proxying causes a US jurisdiction claim of infringement to be pertinent no matter where the files are hosted, but that moves rather to my point that it's not a simple analysis and so the vilification of the alleged infringer seems unwarranted at this time.

>No court has ever held that it's fair use to reproduce copyright images because you think they look cool //

Low-pixel copies of images have been allowed for various purposes. Are you saying this particular issue has been addressed by the courts, I'm not aware of it, could you post the details? Thanks.

Releasing an application called "Top Gear TV" is remarkably naive on its own (it's one of the BBC's biggest worldwide commercial franchises) - doing it with 10 other major properties just turned something that was only a matter of time, into an absolute inevitability.

did his apps display ads over/with the content provided by third party? Did youtube ads still play in the viewer?

Either way, don't really approve of his arguments

From that website; http://distantfutu.re/page/team.html

Two Founders, Two PR people and One Engineer....

Good structure :¬P

You'd think at least one of the PR people could have handled this fiasco. This would be their time to shine!

>I don't think he fully understands what he really did wrong.

Well, yeah, that's the point of the article. That google never made it clear what he did wrong, so that he could fix it.

> I don't think he fully understands what he really did wrong.

Google not making it entirely clear in their hellbanning email what he did wrong makes the hellbanning double unfair in my opinion.

They did make it clear and it is in the developer agreement the OP agreed to when signing up.

https://play.google.com/about/developer-content-policy.html

> Impersonation or Deceptive Behavior: Don't pretend to be someone else, and don't represent that your app is authorized by or produced by another company or organization if that is not the case. Products or the ads they contain also must not mimic functionality or warnings from the operating system or other apps. Products must not contain false or misleading information in any content, title, icon, description, or screenshots. Developers must not divert users or provide links to any other site that mimics or passes itself off as another app or service. Apps must not have names or icons that appear confusingly similar to existing products, or to apps supplied with the device (such as Camera, Gallery or Messaging).

The OP's apps clearly violate the "title, icon" provisions above. Google even sent him an email about it listing the exact reason in the email, but yet that too is still not enough?

What is it people in this thread want? Do Google personally need to go around OP's house, sit him down, and explain through the developer agreement line by line?

And to be honest I don't know why he's scared to make a new google account. Yeah sure they track your IP address and whatnot but they certainly wont do anything about it. They wont ban an entire household, that's just bullshit.

I don't know why he thought getting suspended wasn't a big deal because he was "innocent". That's also a fairly stupid idea as well.

In addition to carefully making Google's case for them, he then descended into paranoia about Google's tracking. For someone supposedly so experienced in software development, he has some weird ideas about what's right and what's wrong.

If you are trying to monetize, you have likely given Google your real name and address and bank account information, and would need to do the same thing for your new account. Submitting fraudulent information in order to get money could cross you into serious trouble with the IRS or the law.

If you are making a business out of this then creating a new business entity shouldn't be that difficult.

Wait.. so Google's terms state that any new accounts will be terminated.. but you're saying he should just go ahead and violate that term of Google's policies as well?

And assuming that Google won't carry out the threat is a poor way to run a business.. at any time, Google may decide any earnings he's made will be forfeited.

Well he has already violated the terms, might as well keep going - he has very little left to lose.

"I thought I was doing these guys a favor. The apps I wrote would have cost about $50,000 each if I had charged for my time. I basically donated $500,000 to the Android community. That’s how I saw things."

This is where i stopped reading - the author is a bit delusional.

Yeah, he clearly wasn't thinking straight on that one. Even if the time he spent on the first app was worth $50k, he said earlier that he created the other apps just by changing the YouTube channel on the first app and repackaging. Definitely not $500k of work by any stretch.

"The app was simple. Launch it and it display the videos for a single YouTube channel. I made the app, and it was really nice and a pleasure to use."

I'm assuming his hourly rate is $50,000/hr. Did he do anything other than wrap the web page for the channel in a web view? I'm not familiar with Android, but on iOS, you can accomplish this without writing a single line of code, everything could be done inside Interface Builder. I can't imagine it's any more difficult on Android.

he probably factored in all the time he spent learning to build the first app, and then multiplied it by 10...if he's an independent developer i'd be very hesitant to contract him given his poor billing techniques

On the other hand I would be quite hesitant to hire a developer to build a customized video player for tens of thousands of dollars if he was going to go on and sell that same code to others for $200 a pop.

Neither approach is right. There's nothing wrong with the write-once sell-many approach, that's basically all of non-custom software development. You shouldn't be charging for your time to learn, either. His 10 apps aren't worth $500,000 in any universe. Maybe you could argue that the entirety of the development was worth $50,000 and value each app at $5000. Maybe. I wouldn't argue that, but someone else could...

I very nearly stopped at this point:

"All Apple products are banned in my household to make a statement about programmer freedom."

Sorry kids, to increase freedom I'm taking away your iPhones and you have to use Samsung.

There must be a Franklin quote there, somewhere ?

It's about as oxymoronic as refusing to play Sun City to support freedom in South Africa.

Yes, this is a bad post.

It gets close to an interesting question (using multiple Google services can result in a domino effect if you violate the TOS of one).

But it raises so many peripheral points, and is so full of whiny after-the-fact juvenile justifications like the one you noticed, that it's impossible to filter out the interesting part.

The only thing I side with him on is this:

If you ask why, you should be told exactly what is wrong. Or better yet, be told exactly what is wrong right away. Obviously packaging other people's content is the issue here, but you should be told exactly what rules are being broken so there's no ambiguity.

I find it amazing that everyone here seems to be a lawyer or extremely well versed in the rules while agreeing with them.

What's wrong with packaging other people's content as long as you're not profiting from it?

If the content owner wants it removed there should be a way to request that while not negatively affecting the developers account.

Plus the whole 3 strikes rule seems a bit too strict for me especially if it's going to be enforced so heavy handedly for what is obviously a minor issue that could have been resolved by a email conversation.

Not to mention other Google accounts like Google Wallet and Google Music getting banned for something like this.

What does one have to do with the other? Do you mean to tell me if i get banned in the Play store all Google account on all services get banned including my Google drive, Google docs, gmail etc

Doesn't that seem a bit absurd to anyone?

How would you like your entire music library deleted because your developer account got banned?

Their policies don't necessarily need to be due to 'ethics' or laws, but just their opinion of what makes a good marketplace.

Perhaps they feel that repackaging other peoples content leads to needless confusion about what is official and not, since anyone and their cat can put up an app that wraps a Youtube channel.

Maybe they feel that apps like that are low quality, so to set a bar they'll restrict it to only the actual rights holders who have a more vested stake in making a good app.

It's really a business decision.

"What's wrong with packaging other people's content as long as you're not profiting from it?"

Everything, and the "you're not profiting from it" part is completely irrelevant and can be skipped from the sentence.

Redistributing other people's content without their consent is simply not allowed, and the fact that they have made this content freely available on channel A doesn't give you permission to make it freely available on channel B.

And no matter what position you take on copyright, impersonating their name, as the original poster had done, is clearly unethical and unexcusable.

The Description of the app clearly states that the app is not actually affiliated in any way with the original content creator.

So it's not really impersonation is it?

Plus they can always just request nicely for it to be removed if their really that bothered by it.

What is with this need of taking drastic measures for something as simple as this. Whatever happened to talking to the developer and sorting it out like gentlemen.

They did request for it to be removed. They sent Google the request, which is what I would do, because dealing with some spammy app developer isn't worth my time. And frankly, given how this guy doesn't admit to wrongdoing or even breaking the rules, I don't buy that he'd be particularly responsive. I expect I'd get a defensive and argumentative email in response.

This is why we can't have nice things you just assume he's not going to comply but you don't even make an attempt to resolve the issue in a gentlemanly fashion.

Why? Because you can't be bothered to.

You would rather give him a black mark on his account with the knowledge that only 3 in his life time would get him permanently banned.

This is why we can't have nice things you just assume he's not going to comply but you don't even make an attempt to resolve the issue in a gentlemanly fashion.

Why? Because you can't be bothered to

Yes, because it's a waste of time and resources.

One developer, one email conversation, fine, not the largest time investment.

What about all of the other developers in the world?

Especially if this became a recognised method of gaining work?

Suddenly you need full-time staff dedicated to the non-core-business activity of writing "gentlemanly" emails.

It's unworkable.

Edit: wrong thread.

I would gladly pay for Google support, and I've stated as much in the past.

I have paid for Microsoft support, and it was a great experience. Microsoft is (or was) as big or bigger than Google, and used by a significant fraction of the population.

So, it can be done. Google doesn't want to do it.

Did you reply to the wrong comment? The discussion here is about whether the content owner should make a polite request to the creator of an infringing app rather than filing a takedown notice with Google. Google's lack of support is legendary, but not relevant.

Yes, I got two threads mixed up :( .

I agree that the original content owners shouldn't have to contact the creators (it would be nice though, most are way too overzealous).

The BBC should not be expected to reach our to every spammy app developer personally to politely ask that their infringing app be removed. Not only would this be more costly for them than interacting directly with Google, it would likely get some IP enforcement employees there fired when someone higher up noticed that apps were not being taken down promptly.

I don't like that Google banned this guy from Google wallet and from buying apps, but I have no issue with them banning him from publishing new apps. He blatantly violated trademarks repeatedly, and he published low-quality apps that by his own admission were identical except for an ID change, and provided no functionality aside from being a YouTube wrapper. He's a spammer.

Gentlemanly fashion would involve the guilty party to invest all the effort in resolving the situation and apologize to everyone involved, instead of demanding others to educate him and point out how exactly to improve his wrongdoings.

Noone is really entitled to free handholding from others in the first place, and doing harmful stuff (such as spamming the appmarket with those fake apps) doesn't offer any extra rights, it can only offer extra duties.

It would be harsh to punish someone after the first offense, but if someone is showing both with his words (the "clarification" sent to google) and actions (the other two strikes) that he perceives those actions as socially acceptable, then there's no duty for anyone to reeducate him when just putting him on lifetime ignorelist achieves the required result (protecting appstore customers from such publishers) much cheaper, faster and better.

Even worse: he'd offer to sell you the app for $50,000!

Aside from the legal and policy issues, as a user this stuff can be pretty annoying. You just want say the Facebook app and you have to wade through half a dozen spam apps saying Facebook in their name before you get to the real one. With facebook it's fairly obvious but if you are trying to download some app you don't know well it's easy to get a bogus one by mistake.

Packaging another person's content should result in an immediate take down of an app. A content owner should not have to opt out of other people using their material, that is akin to telling people you can use someone's stuff until they catch you. I put along the lines of, would you let people use your house just because the door was open? Take your car? It is content/stuff you own. Why do some many discount digital content in value?

In some ways the www is still the wild wild west, anything goes until they come looking for you. Looking for gold on another person's land and such.

How about a bit of text near your content warning me that I'm not allowed to use your stuff regardless of my intentions be it a free fan app that will actually spread your content further or whatever.

That would be helpful and remove all the confusion.

Edit: We don't all live in the US so don't assume your laws apply to everyone lawyer-san. Even if something equivalent did exist in every other country it still doesn't make it sane. We all know copyright is broken in many ways. The default should be open like it originally used to be.

The text is in 15 U.S. Code § 1114.

Edit: We don't all live in the US so don't assume your laws apply to everyone.

I'm well aware that we don't all live in the US; I don't, either. But if you publish an app in an US marketplace, it's subject to US law.

Here's the deal. When you're talking about physical stuff when I have it, you can't have it and vise versa. If you have a car and I steal it, you are denied the use of said car.

When it comes to copies of things, though, that all breaks down. When you make a movie and I make an illegal copy (I don't pirate things but let's suppose for a second) you aren't prevented from owning the movie any longer. You've lost a sale for sure, but I didn't just take the copyright away from you and now it's mine and I can sell it and you can't. But that's not even what this guy did.

What we're talking about here is the creation of an "unauthorized" front-end that uses public APIs to display things which are already public.

When you said "take" you're really abusing language in a preposterous way.

First of all nobody was denied use of anything so it's not STOLEN.

Second this content is already freely available on the web.

Third it's freely available via the generic youtube apps google publishes.

Fourth his app didn't download copies to his servers which it then served up (which would be copyright infringement) denying the originating youtube channels views or likes or whatever.

By your "packaging" logic anyone who embeds a bunch of a particular youtube channel's videos onto a webpage should have their servers nuked from orbit. That doesn't pass the laugh test.

https://www.google.com/search?q=youtube+embed+channel

If using an unauthorized front-end is really so naughty then why are people allowed to embed things?

Should youtube channel owners be able to dictate which browsers people are allowed to use to view their channels on youtube? Should they be allowed to say "IPv4 only" and disallow the use of IPv6? Should they have the right to dictate which networks are allowed to transport their video? Maybe their content should only be visible to Mac owners and sufficiently cool linux guys but under no circumstances should a windows user be able to view their video.

OK, so let's ban Firefox from the app store for packaging other people's content. He didn't package, nor did he take their material - that implies that his app somehow contained their content. It did not. It simply let you browse their YouTube channel for content the content holder had made freely available.

(also, your comparison to houses and cars is nigh-on nonsensical: copyrighted material is not a possession, and one person using it does not preclude another person using it, whereas if someone took my car I would be down by one car.)

> Packaging another person's content should result in an immediate take down of an app. A content owner should not have to opt out of other people using their material, that is akin to telling people you can use someone's stuff until they catch you.

Why do you place the content into the internet if you don't want other people to use it? You also don't complain about search engines indexing your content or other people linking to your content.

Lets not get into the car analogies here. Please.

I don't see how wrapping that content is/was different from what Firefox does - except that firefox allows you to go to more than one webpage.

This is, in my mind, a separate issue from impersonating a company.

The difference is Firefox doesn't put one app for every website it accesses in the App Store named after the website and using the websites logo.

I specifically said they were two distinct issues. He could have named the app "watch car shown online".

You can have your content just fine without anyone taking it from you - just don't publish it. Wanting to both give the content to people and keep it to yourself at the same time is a bit contradictory IMHO. I'm not strictly against people being able to restrict how their content is used, but they definitely should have to explicitly state this. The content itself wants to spread and it will do so if left alone. Unlike your car, remember, which won't magically multiply so that every single person looking on it gets his own version. Anyway, if you want your content to be restricted in some way you should just say so, because what you want is unnatural and exceptional in case of content (and perfectly reasonable, natural and common place in case of your car, where, conveniently, you don't have to do anything if you happen to wan't it to not be stolen).

>What's wrong with packaging other people's content as long as you're not profiting from it?

Say I made a show and sell DVDs of the show for $20 to cover all the costs of the show. When you buy the DVD you agree to not reproduce them so that I can continue to sell more copies to cover the cost of the show. You then start reproducing them and selling them at your cost(no profiting right?) which is about $0.05. Obviously some will get it from you instead of me because it is so much cheaper and I will make less profit, or not meet costs. If you don't see what is wrong in breaking your word (and a legally binding contract) and causing harm to someone just because you didn't profit from it, I don't know what argument would.

If they had given you access to the content under a license which allowed you to share it then yeah sure who cares repackage away. If they shared it with you with the specific previsions that you can do this but not that, then you turn around and do that. Then why would you think it is OK to do that?

That's completely not the scenario, though?

All the content is already available on youtube. He's just providing a different way of finding it. Nothing wrong with it.

Eh? Did you read the post?

"I wrote a simple YouTube client app using the latest YouTube APIs" - The content was not pirated, he created an app with one purpose; to allow you to play videos from one particular YouTube channel.

What is your definition of pirated? Accessing content, and helping others access content in ways that you have not been given permission to rather sounds like piracy to me. The method of access doesn't really matter weather it be boot leg DVDs or youtube.

"helping others access content in ways that you have not been given permission" - That doesn't sound like what he did.

The videos were uploaded to YouTube and he used the YouTube API to display those videos as part of his app.

Piracy is making unauthorized copies, either to or from another person.

I think there would be no issue with it if he had not used trademark names and logos. API calls to youtube, pulling up a channel, playing videos... if Youtube/Google doesn't have a policy like Apple to not allow apps that duplicate their apps functionality, I don't see how it could be a problem. Most probably is that problem arose with trademark infringement. This is a serious issue since 3rd party using your trademark without authorization can tarnish your carefully crafted design/brand experience as well as confuse customers.

He used the YouTube APIs exactly as they are intended to be used. There is no issue with his use of the YouTube APIs to wrap a channel. The only potential issue would be the implication that the trademark holder endorsed his app by including their name in the application title, and I think that's an arguable point. I definitely believe that the trademark owners would complain, but I don't think he necessarily did anything technically illegal.

If you want that analogy to be right, the person would be buying copies of the DVD and then repacking them 1:1 at a cost of 5 cents. It's totally OK to do that.

Remember, their app is nothing more than a small blob of java[script] that provides a limited but improved window onto youtube.

Google does not do that, because it could bite them if they do and if this goes to court.

What this shows is how anti-user closed app eco-systems are. Some users probably found his app very useful but can't use it because lawyers.

You'd have the same problem if you were on the open web and the company sent a DMCA takedown request to your hosting company.

Mentioning that venue B is screwed up, is hardly proof that that venue A being screwed up, is a good thing.

I'm not saying it is a good thing. I'm saying it's not a problem caused by "closed app eco-systems". Trademarks apply to both closed and open marketplaces.

At least the DMCA takedown wouldn't also somehow disable his google music subscription.

That's a problem with bundling services under a single account, not with the closed-ecosystem part. For example, GoDaddy suspends all your sites when you get a DMCA takedown to any single one of them.

I agree that the approach is bonkers, but it's not an issue exclusive to "walled gardens".

Actually no. The DMCA is a nationalistic piece of absolute garbage, but it does allow you to file a counter notification, google does not.

If you were on the open web, his app would be a page with youtube's embed code for each video.

I doubt you would use a DMCA takedown request for this. You'd just disable embedding of your videos in your youtube options. Youtube probably already knows when a video isn't requested from either youtube's website or the official youtube app.

I think its fair to ask why you can't get human intervention on these kinds of problems and for Google to _at least_ consider what happened was an honest mistake and not something intentionally attempting to damage other peoples trademark (or whatever).

That's another trouble with so many of these mega companies now that don't seem to have any kind of instance of customer or end user support at all. It's easy to code auto response systems, and bots that track down spam and malicious software, but to get an actual person to review what is being done is nearly impossible.

As a user, I tend to disagree. Finding the store full of knock-offs that just are a skin over a YouTube channel is frustrating when looking for actual content and not a simple YouTube skin. He's not the first guy to make this YouTube-wrapper app, there are a lot of them. Too many.

First, this sounds like a problem the application store provider needs to solve with an improved interface, not nuking anything they don't personally find useful from orbit.

Second, what's "actual content"? Official content only? Undoubtedly some people who searched for "top gear" were looking for exactly what this guy put out.

Completely disagree. People at Google acted in a ridiculous manner. This is atrocious.

"It's all your fault any way." Very mature, man.

Your position is a common response: paint the affected individual in such light that you can safely state he's different from you, and making it obvious this wouldn't possibly happen to you.

The important facts, irrespective of the correctness of app suspension are:

a) App suspension led to Google Wallet suspension. Google Wallet can be used as a payment processor, so this decision could have affected entirely independent revenue streams. It's inexcusable for Google to do this!

b) Google support is awful. This is a known fact. AdSense suspensions are probably the most common. I've been affected by one. Google does not answer. Ever. Period. (well, if you're lucky you get a canned response).

The conclusion is that an irresponsible and deaf company now holds power over huge swaths of people.

I'm uncomfortable. And so should you be.

B is probably a legal issue. If they give you any additional information outside of their canned, lawyer-approved responses, you may be able to use that in a legal claim against them.

I can't speak for _petronius, but what makes this guy obviously different from me is:

* he thinks that an icon which links to something on the web is an "app", whereas I think that an app is something which contains a significant amount of program logic.

* he thinks that changing the configuration (like YT channel id) generates a whole new app. This is like claiming that, at your Unix command line, "grep foo" is a different app from "grep bar" because we changed the string that it looks for.

* he thinks that going from an "app" with a hard-coded YT channel to one with a user-configurable channel is a big step in development, the "real app".

* he thinks he can no longer write apps for Android, whereas it is obvious to me that you can put a .apk file up for download anywhere you want, and get paid by means other than Google Wallet.

* he cannot see what he obviously did wrong: make a spammy app that only re-frames other people's content, and infringes on trademarks, etc. In response to the first takedown, I would have pulled all copies of this app immediately.

Google only holds power over those swaths of people who surrendered some aspects of their lives to Google.

He also claims to have done $500,000 of development for the eco system for Google in the spirit of Open Source with the development he had done before being banned.

Yeah. That's a bit ridiculous. If that was $500,000 of work, I should be a billionaire.

His logic is probably: VALUE = timeSpent * overpricedBillingRate

In reality he only provided about as much value as people found in the app.

To be fair, he claimed that those he would have charged out each of those apps at 50K for custom development time. I don't know if he has the pipeline, infrastructure, etc. to actually bill out clients for Android apps at that rate, but that doesn't sound like an extremely high number to me for custom software work.

You are confusing $500K worth of "work" with $500K worth of billing. A common problem in our industry.

I don't think he could have found clients gullible enough to pay that much for what's essentially a web view in a minimal wrapper. But I suck at the marketing.

Yeah, except he himself described the first app as "simple" and the next 9 apps after the first consisted of nothing more than changing the YouTube channel id the app pointed to and changing the app's name.

$50,000 seems pretty exorbitant for a "simple" app that does nothing more than embed YouTube videos.

$50,000 for the literally 5 minutes of work involved in changing the channel ID and app name is downright comical.

There's no way to spin this as $500,000 worth of work. I don't care what his billing rates are. (And I suspect his billing rates aren't very high to begin with — he doesn't strike me as the sharpest tool in the shed.)

Actually that sort of semi-custom simple rebranding is an exceedingly common business model for boutique software shops. You find a market where the framework for your application works with minimal changes across a large variety of clients. The sales cycle then becomes the scaling bottle neck. It is sort of the other side of the coin of low touch SaaS.

You are making a common mistake on pricing something based on the amount of work it requires, not on the amount of value it provides. I can't imagine that a rebranded youtube viewer provides 50K worth of value to anyone, but it wouldn't be nearly the most outlandish work/value ratio I've seen.

50K of "billing" time for a prototype that views one youtube channel seems excessive. At $150/hr that's over 2 months of fulltime development for something a real developer could knock out in a couple days.

What was funny to me was that the author claimed, "Ah, those are just silly, throw-away apps I developed for my kids and friends." at the start of the article, and then jumped to, "I dedicated $500,000 worth of my efforts on these apps!" later on in the article. Well, that escalated way too quickly ....

Also, what is that statement that amounts to "Nobody uses Android in San Francisco"? I found it pretty ridiculous ....

> Google only holds power over those swaths of people who surrendered some aspects of their lives to Google

No. Google wallet is, as of now, an unacceptable payment processor for me. Its existence, however, precludes other competitors from entering the space. As such, even if I do not use Google services, its power still affects me.

For a reduction to the absurd, imagine Google wallet a payment processor monopolist, or a duopolist (with PayPal).

>Its existence, however, precludes other competitors from entering the space.

Amazon and Paypal are still both way bigger than Google Wallet is. I sincerely doubt that anybody looking to get into the payment processing industry is saying "crap, we can't do this because Google already does". They're worried about competing with Paypal. Hell, even Bitcoin is accepted at more places than Google Wallet is, from my own life experiences.

Do Paypal and Bitcoin work as standard payment processors for applications in the Play store? And Amazon, for non-Kindle devices?

The whole point of the walled garden is that, in order to be able to access a customer base, you have to play by the rules of the gatekeeper (and pay the toll). I'm not comfortable with a market model where the only choice is what garden you want to be in.

PayPal is accepted in the Play Store. Do some research.

Most normal users would search for apps for each channel. I don't think the guy is really trying to say that they are all totally unique codebases.

The author openly admits that this was a small, throwaway app that he wrote as an experiment, which contributed to his indifference as apps got suspended. It doesn't have to be complex to qualify as an "app".

I'm sure the author understands he can still write code for Android, but as he stated in the article, he might as well not if he expects any exposure. Alternative app stores and sideloaded APKs are used by approximately no one.

I don't think it can really be said he's liable for any kind of infringement just by using the YT API to wrap content. The issue would be in using the company name to imply endorsement of his applications, but even that could be a stretch. Should he have broken down to the old Red Hat trick and said "a prominent North American YouTube channel TV"?

While I probably wouldn't have made the same decisions this guy did, tolerance and handling of these types of uncommon miscommunications are part of the responsibility a company assumes when it decides to hook into so many parts of its users' lives. With the indispensability of something like Google, they really should be more careful before they mess up someone's life with this kind of action. Not everything can be resolved with a static, generalized FAQ.

The whole thing could've been averted if Google had taken the effort to clarify what was happening and why directly, by real communication from a human that is obviously personalized, at any point in the process.

Excellent and logical response, cookiecaper. The developer's article could have been written more succinctly, but the points he makes are completely valid and the larger issue of how Google's unintended power to credibly damage a developer's career should not be taken lightly.

> he thinks he can no longer write apps for Android, whereas it is obvious to me that you can put a .apk file up for download anywhere you want, and get paid by means other than Google Wallet.

And how many people will find and buy such an app? You do know of the standard security advice to disallow app installations outside of the Play Store as this is the main attack vector for malware on Android, for example for banking trojans? Also I would have to be extremely motivated to get this app before I go through the hassle of paying via a non Play Store payment service.

> make a spammy app that only re-frames other people's content, and infringes on trademarks

What is Youtube if not a (not so spammy) service that reframes other people's content and for a long time infringed on copyrights?

The Amazon app store is pretty popular, and you can install it on any android device.

> he thinks he can no longer write apps for Android, whereas it is obvious to me that you can put a .apk file up for download anywhere you want, and get paid by means other than Google Wallet.

He justifies this pretty well. Very few people are going to buy your app if it's an APK on a random website or even on another app store. The next biggest marketplace I can think of is Amazon's and it's still puny compared to Google Play. Without access to the main store it's not financially viable to develop for Android.

I'm not sure I was painting him as "different" from me, or even making it about him vs. me at all.

The onus is on you, the person using the service, to understand what terms and conditions you have agreed to abide by when using that service. If Google fail to uphold their end of the agreement and you lose revenue, you can seek remedy through legal means (although, obviously, that's a pretty crap position to be in); if the agreement doesn't protect you from arbitrary banishment from the service for life, then that is important to know up front.

It would be awesome if Google's support was better; it would be awesome if they were more responsive to the people that make their money through the marketplace they've set up; but ultimately they have no legal obligation to be any of those things, and in business your legal obligations are your only obligations. (I am making no qualitative defense of that fact, merely describing its existence.)

If one doesn't keep those things in mind, then regardless of how irresponsible Google is or isn't, that failure constitutes a kind of irresponsibility all its own.

Whether I personally would never fall afoul of something like this (possible, since I'm a programmer, not a lawyer) is secondary to the best way of dealing with a much larger company that holds all of the cards (follow the terms and conditions; heed the multiple warnings they give you). My personal discomfort at Google acting like jerks is, too (insofar as I don't currently rely on them for any kind of revenue).

>>but ultimately they have no legal obligation to be any of those things, and in business your legal obligations are your only obligations.

So businesses don't have any ethical obligations then? Cool.

They do, but I don't think Google is ethically obligated to let this guy post spammy apps that are closely named to companies he doesn't officially work with. I've been a professional Android developer for 2+ years and a user for longer than that. I'm 100% in support of Google banning this guy from the Google Play store.

One of the major misunderstandings about the Play Store is that there "are no rules" in comparison to Apple's App Store. That's not the case. Apple filters up front, Google deals with terms & conditions violations after you are already published.

Now, I think the negative here is that he conflated his personal accounts with his publishing accounts. I generally recommend against that, even if you are a hobbyist developer.

> They do, but I don't think Google is ethically obligated to let this guy post spammy apps that are closely named to companies he doesn't officially work with.

But Google is ethically obligated not to punish the guy by closing associated services (GWallet). It is also ethically bound to treat the customer as good-intentioned, and bound to explain the basis for suspension.

Google failed on both counts.

He hasn't even tried to reactivate the wallet account. They requested information to verify his identity, which he claims "will be used to confirm and blacklist his address", so he hasn't provided it.

Which is even more interesting, since he said he can't open a new account and move on because they'll block him by IP address... so what exactly is he going to lose by sending the verification?

I don't have a big problem with banning his dev account from the Play store. I rather dislike the fact that all of his other Google accounts (Wallet, buying things on Play, Music, etc) got banned as well. That's exactly the kind of thing that makes me wary of actually ever making an Android app in my own name.

To be a canny participant in the economy as it exists, we have to acknowledge how companies should behave doesn't always (or often) line up with how they do behave.

In business, many (if not most) participants will seek to maximize thier advantage within the rules; if you don't establish rules (via contract or something else) or understand and follow the existing ones, it's quite disingenuous to complain that you are at a disadvantage.

I don't like that fact, but (cultural sea-change aside) that's one of the costs of doing business, whether it's on a small scale or a large one.

But we can acknowledge that even as we work to change the status quo. So perhaps there is hope yet.

I agree Google support is awful, but if I'm reading this correctly, he named one of his apps "Vice TV." He sounds pretty naive if he thinks he can get away with that. I don't buy it either. I think he intentionally played dumb.

>The conclusion is that an irresponsible and deaf company now holds power over huge swaths of people.

Walled gardens and all that. We're all choosing to play in them.

The walled garden I can live with. The problem is that his actions inside the walled garden had effects outside. It's like crashing your car while drunk driving causes your insurance company to cancel your credit card (because the same company owns both your bank and your insurance company).

You're awfully willful about this whole thread. To a degree that you might be the author.

It's a matter of convenience, not necessity, to bank and insure through the same company, but this exposes you to a greater degree of risk, which only compounds with irresponsible behavior as a customer. End of story. He shouldn't have used his personal account. That's part of the reason individuals do things like set up LLCs, to shield individuals from liability in operations related to business, but maybe this guy can't be bothered to understand stupid business or legal logic behind such decisions.

This whole thing reeks of an appeal to pity and logical fallacy. His background is not especially relevant to report on the situation. His switch from Apple to Android fandom and why he made that switch are even less important. If anything, his purported history as a developer should have given him every single indication that what he was doing was subjectively wrong, according to Google. He ignored these signs and subscribed to his own styling of reality. Seems like a sensitive homebrew developer with an overinflated ego ($500k worth of time, my ass) got iced for his bad behavior. Natural selection in action.

> You're awfully willful about this whole thread. To a degree that you might be the author.

Come on! Unnecessary ad-hominem. I'm easily googleable and obviously not the author.

I won't dignify the rest of your comment with an answer.

A tongue-in-cheek observation is hardly ad-hominem. The remark was made to point out that you have a habit of cherry-picking arguments and refuse to see any reason behind opposing views in the same vein of the author, to state plainly. I don't actually care about who you are. At all.

And responding to a reasoned argument is hard to dignify when you have neither a response nor dignity.

Relevant bit from the article:

Google explicitly states that any new accounts created by you will be immediately terminated. Google tracks everything you do. They track all the IP addresses you access your accounts from. They read your mail and track your location, they read your docs, they know your credit card numbers and home and work addresses. They also know who your friends are and who you chat with and email. It’s possible, but incredibly difficult to fool their surveillance.

His Google Music account was cancelled as well. And one could imagine, easily, Google launching a platform (Google Fraud Detection) to allow 3rd parties to determine if a developer or system is suspect--which in turn could result in blackballing for everyone.

While I don't disagree that Google support is abysmal, they do respond if you know the appropriate channels.

I've gotten support for both Adwords and Adsense and can successful claim I've been unbanned from both at different periods of time. That isn't to excuse your point but wanted to put this out there that while difficult, it is possible.

I couldn't get through to Google help pages for adsense because their webforms block on my (real) surname.

Mildly frustrating.

That's just bad business. It's like the MPAA and RIAA suing their customers. In the short run you can bully a few independent people but, in the long run, you are eroding your user base -- or developer base in this case.

I consider the apps in question fair use. Now, I've never read google's TOS but, then again, neither has anyone else. You'll notice that the op was working with the system to try to understand its rules. That's the quintessence of what a hacker does. It seems to me that google is making themselves vulnerable to an open app store. One where you can experiment and collect user feedback before committing resources to a project.

Youtube provides videos that users specifically label as a creative commons license, and are available for commercial use. He may have not been in the wrong, though it's pretty doubtful considering his questionable judgement on everything else.

You're missing the nub of the issue - sure the guy made mistakes and ignored warnings. But the fact remains that he was banned by an impersonal, automated system with no chance of appeal, and as such is now effectively locked out of the entire android app ecosystem for ever - an therefore an entire possible line of business. Note there's also no possibility for him to mend his ways and be re-instated.

Imagine if the same applied to people who run physical businesses - some shop owner skips some paperwork thinking it'll be harmless, gets caught, gets a fine... and then is banned from ever owning a shop ever again for the rest of his life, no appeal.

This is our brave new cloud-oriented future - where all the power to regulate what content is available to millions of users lies in the hands of a couple of private companies. I find the whole thing very worrying, and am very glad that the FirefoxOS and Ubuntu phone projects are moving forward to provide some kind of alternative.

I tried one of his apks : The Verge TV. It installs an app of the same name. The First Screen is the logo of the website on 2/3 of the screen and a description of the website. In a corner there is a disclaimer button, clicking on it leads me to a disclaimer explaining that 'The Verge TV is not affiliated with The Verge'.

I find it hard to believe that he did not realize that an app copying the names & graphics of popular websites would get him banned for impersonation. Chances are that some of these websites reported him to Google.

The author used others people's content and spammed with play store with official sounding apps, then ignored warnings to stop. Got caught and punished for it, now Google won't let him do it again.

Honestly, it just sounds like Google were doing the right thing and protecting it's users from low quality spam apps.

So banning him from using Google Wallet to BUY anything ever again is a proportional response? O.o

The lack of feedback would be annoying.

Ignored warnings to stop? It sounds like the author did one thing (uploading ten apps) and then got three "strikes" and a full suspension without doing anything else.

That's like saying a mass murder just killed 10 people in a single go so it should be 'just one thing' in court. Each individual act is a separate 'crime'.

That's a false equivalence. Apps are not people.

> Apps are not people.

Not yet.

Coming soon to a Supreme Court near you.

It's a comparison, an analogy if you will not a 1:1 equivalence.

This even includes some bad police work. Because since the developer didn't post a single app of this type after the initial suspension google could have easily identified all apps and found them all and notified the developer that all apps must be dealt with.

This would be akin to the police having 10 open murders with the same exact weapon, charging the assailant with one and not looking for any other open murders on file.

Banning his developer account is one thing. Cancelling his other Google accounts is complete bullshit.

The author didn't use other people's content. He simply used the YouTube APIs for exactly what they're there for -- remixing the YouTube experience to match a specific use case YouTube has not yet accommodated. What else are APIs supposed to be used for?

The original uploader of that content still retained all control over the content. If the original uploader didn't like his content being reskinned, he shouldn't upload it on a provider that gives users that ability through an API.

The potential problem is in the implication that the mark's owner endorsed the application. The post claims that the the author made significant effort to indicate he was unofficial. It's arguable whether this continued to constitute infringement, and for that reason I think the guy should've at least been given a polite human touch and a direct, non-automated opportunity to correct the specific issue, which was never directly elucidated ("Impersonating how? I'm just using the YouTube APIs that Google published for me to use...").

I'm not saying that the author has great judgment. I'm just saying that Google's actions aren't really proportional, that the author's actions are not at all as illegal as everyone is saying, and that Google should recognize that they have a social responsibility to at least follow-up on things like this with a human to clear up any potential miscommunication. An expectation of care in account deletion is one of the side effects of knowing and doing everything about and for everyone. It's a big deal to lose big chunks of your Google account.

So using YouTube's API to use other people's content isn't using other people's content? I don't follow the logic there.

Yes, he was not banned simply because he used other people's content. He was banned because he was using other people's content to create low quality apps which (even if unintentionally) imitated official applications. Taking someone else's content and serving it up in a way that looks like it's official is just asking to be banned, especially when the thing you're imitating is YouTube and the app is on the Play store.

If someone is, for all intents and purposes, spamming your app store with imitation apps, why should you waste time giving them a "polite human touch"? If this had been a Chinese company rather than someone with a sob story would you still expect Google to offer a polite human touch?

>So using YouTube's API to use other people's content isn't using other people's content? I don't follow the logic there.

It's not using it without permission. That's what the API is there for, to let you use the content in certain ways such as what the app did. The only issue was branding, and this is a severe overreaction to a branding issue.

>1 app, 2 apps, 10 apps? Did it matter either way? I could have posted 50 apps if I wanted

>So I was using the app store as my beta testing platform.

>I was planning on taking all these apps down in a few weeks anyway.

>I thought I could get maybe 20-30 apps suspended without repercussions

>In this age of Google, it’s now “obey or face an instant lifetime ban.” This is progress? What does the future hold if we are forced to strictly obey and understand every legal gotcha in Google’s terms of service? I believe in freedom, not blind obedience. I made some mistakes and would have removed all my apps if I had known the true consequences.

He spammed the Google Play store with multiple unfinished versions of the same applications for "beta testing", received warnings which he chose to ignore and then got banned for his gross abuse of the service.

Instead of "I messed up, here's a warning to others" it's a case of "why don't Google let me mess around with their service as much as I like? This is oppression, this is America goddamnit, where's muh freedom?!?"

Zero sympathy. Well done to Google on taking down one of the many people spamming the Play store with junk.

Getting banned from publishing apps to the Play Store is reasonable and proportional. Getting banned from all Google services whether related or not seems a bit much imho.

> Zero sympathy. Well done to Google on taking down one of the many people spamming the Play store with junk.

Yes, also, I find it highly amusing how his long-winded whine about 'programmer freedom' makes me appreciate the walled-garden approach of iOS just a tiny bit more. Sure, it's not perfect, and it's not 'freedom', but at the very least it does make it very explicit to 'developers' like the author that they should take their spammy app tactics (and free-riding on someone else's content, using a free service and its users as your beta testing platform) somewhere else.

Funny thing is I'm pretty sure he would get banned from the Windows Phone store pretty quickly as well (and rightly so)

> Anyone using my simplistic beta quality app would know instantly that this is not “official”

A silly assumption that both generalizes the audience and is ignorant of copyright laws, imo. Not a valid argument in a court situation either. I could make the crappiest Geocities site out there, but as soon as I put a Google logo somewhere, people may assume it is an official Google site or affiliated with it.

> One of my apps contained the channel id for Vice.com. Since the length of the app name is so limited I decided on “Vice TV”

Yup, there you go. Using a brand name, showing a brand's video - intent isn't the issue here, the author was impersonating Vice.com there.

The author is guilty of being naive and lax about copyright and trademark laws, imo.

So you complain about being ignorant about copyright laws then demonstrate complete ignorance of them. Copyright has nothing to do with it.

The apps contained icons taken from third parties and then utilised to advertise these apps. So copyright is very much in play here, as well as trademark infringement.

As to your jab at the person above, it might have come across better if it was even remotely constructive. For example, you could explain WHY you feel they misunderstand copyright rather than just waving your hands around and claiming that they're "completely ignorant."

Almost like how Youtube ignores copyright and trademark laws.

Except they don't, and in fact have built a state-of-the-art video and audio recognition system to deal with infringement[1], and of course respond to DMCA takedown requests.

There's plenty of infringement on YouTube, of course, but that's inevitable for any platform where anonymous users can submit media files.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube#Content_ID

> that's inevitable for any platform where anonymous users can submit media files

Exactly.

I thought it was weird that he kept mentioning children's apps but then has one for Vice TV.

Sure Google is a private company. Sure this means they have no formal responsibility to this developer. Programmatically, he seems to deserve to be sanctioned: he violated their policies for several weeks with several different apps.

I emailed Google back and asked them to tell me exactly what I need to change to be compliant with the rules. Is it the icon? The name? The disclaimer? What? Google refused to give me any additional information.

But if his story is true, he makes good faith efforts to be compliant. What, if any, is the social responsibility a company has that owns half the market of mobile development platforms to people that could potentially make a living using their platform? Monopolies/duopolies throw a wrench in the invisible hand, and I'm not sure there's a clear answer.

Even if his story is true there's a lot of fallacious arguments and lack of reasoning in his claims. It's the type of "I-can-do-anything" mentality that was his pitfall.

Just because he might think that using somebody else's trademark to create a revenue stream for yourself is doing them a favor, doesn't mean anybody else has to. I don't have pity for his point-of-view, but I do think that it was unnecessary and irrelevant to suspend his Google Wallet account.

Still, it doesn't matter what I think: Google reserves the right to do whatever they want.

A good faith effort would be reading the terms & conditions. He obviously didn't, because they are quite clear about not being able to put other companies' names in your app name.

If the article was about someone that had this happen, and they read the conditions and didn't see anything that they had violated, and then asked Google - that would be a different story. This guy just can't be bothered to put the effort in himself.

Yeah because I'm sure the T&C is only a page or two long, not like say 50k words.

https://play.google.com/intl/en_us/about/play-terms.html

The idea that you should have to scrutinize that entire document to determine what you did wrong is crazy.

Ostensibly someone on the Google side of things determined what he did that was not OK right? I mean they don't just ban people for the hell of it right? He had to do something SPECIFICALLY wrong, and that might correspond to some portion of the T&C. Is it so unreasonable to ask WHAT section you're violating?

I get that everyone on HN thinks the guy is a douche and deserves what he got. But to refuse to even say what? That's douchey too.

It's not crazy. Guess what, sometimes publishing an app is more than just writing code. I've had to dig through them before too. Compared to what the iOS team has to deal with I consider it a pretty lightweight process.

If you just want to hack around with some code, then post the APK somewhere and tell your friends to download it. If you want to publish an app in an app store, that is a fundamentally different thing. It's not even engineering. This is what product managers and legal teams deal with at companies. If you are a solo app publisher, you still have to deal with it. You don't get to opt out of these costs just because it's not fun.

Those aren't even the right T&C. These are the developer ones, and they're even shorter.

https://play.google.com/about/developer-distribution-agreeme...

https://play.google.com/about/developer-content-policy.html

If you stick both into word, that's only 16 pages of stuff to read. Don't claim to be an engineer if you can't wade through 16 pages of specs. And the relevant part for this discussion is on page 1, the 4th bullet point after "Hate Speech", "Violence & Bullying", and "Sexually Explicit Material". It's not exactly buried.

If I sue someone for something I don't get to just say "your honor, look at the law and this contract, they're clearly violating it!" and blammo get a judgement against them. I have to enumerate my claims as to what they did wrong. I have to CITE things.

Should we hold Google to the same standard that we hold the criminal justice system? No obviously not.

But if it's so obvious what portion of the T&C he's breaking surely a hyperlink to that portion of the document should take only a second to generate. And if it's not obvious and requires some nuanced thought then perhaps a paragraph explaining would be warranted. And some links.

But to suggest that Google explaining itself would prove some kind of undue burden on Google for their actions is ridiculous! They've already hired people to police this kind of stuff. To suggest that Google couldn't have these human reviewers take a second to explain their decisions (at a fairly lost cost) boggles the mind.

"The suspension email stated that I was trying to impersonate another company, and that this was forbidden."

Impersonation or Deceptive Behavior: Don't pretend to be someone else, and don't represent that your app is authorized by or produced by another company or organization. .. Apps must not have names or icons that appear confusingly similar to existing products

I don't know how Google can be any more clear about that. By the authors own admission, the email used the exact same words as the T&C he violated. If I had to bet, there was a link in there to page. You're arguing here without actually reviewing the underlying documents.

"Apps must not have names or icons that appear confusingly similar to existing products"

Okay so then a single extra sentence stating "The icon and name you have chosen are unacceptable because you are not X, Y or Z and constitute impersonation in our opinion" would have cleared up all the problems.

But that didn't happen did it? Nope!

That is not a satisfactory response.

From the OP:

I emailed Google back and asked them to tell me exactly what I need to change to be compliant with the rules. Is it the icon? The name? The disclaimer? What?

Repeating the T&C verbiage alone is not good enough.

Did OP do something wrong? Yes, definitely. Is being banned from all other Google-related activities forever without recourse proportional? No. The response - being the sum of all its direct consequences - is tyrannical, and worse, automatic and faceless. Unless you enjoy being A Perfectly Obedient Citizen (TM), the only real lesson here is to not put all your eggs in one basket. Use Google, use Apple, but beware of letting them have full control of important parts of your life.

I use their devices... but my data I own, at least as much as possible. I don't know what I did before ownCloud...

"These warnings to me felt like the warnings on a plastic bag telling you not to put it over your head"

And yet you still put the bag over your head and took a deep breath! Why not just remove the ten apps and use common sense to determine that naming your apps after another company's product is a bad idea??

Good. I wish all the people developing crappy and useless apps, flooding the place, would get banned. You publish 10 different apps where the only thing that changes is the youtube channel, and claim you were beta testing? I hope Apple and Microsoft ban you as well.

The most amusing thing is that the Play Store has an incredibly easy way alpha test as well as beta test versions that are distributed only to users who have signed up for testing. In fact, when you upload the apk to the store it's almost literally impossible to miss it. The one issue I have with their test mechanism is that test users have to have an account with Google(even if it's just membership to a single Google Group).

What the OP did was publish spammy garbage. Not to say Google couldn't afford to put a more human touch on their customer and developer relations, but the OP is just way out of line on this one.

"Google could have, and still could block my gmail"

They have a different revenue generation business model for gmail.

My son's account was blocked, couldn't figure out why, and they wouldn't say. I suspect some kind of data mining thing where watching more than 5000 blitzwinger videos on youtube "proves" you're a kid or a teen. He does like his video games...

He falls into that gap between being old enough to have an account per google's rules, but young enough to not have his own credit card or a drivers license (they'd accept a scanned copy of his DL, but he's not 16 yet) so the only option to reinstate his account was to get Dad (me) to charge 50 cents on his CC to "prove" he's of legal age.

So part of the gmail business model is to hold kids (teens) accounts hostage with a threat of permanent deletion until Dad pays 50 cents. I'm not annoyed at the 50 cents, gmail is worth a large multiple of that. I am annoyed that at a random time long after BAU was initiated, they felt like charging us for fun.

It is possible the gmail biz model of randomly applied fees could be applied to play store / wallet accounts.

Not sure if OP would have flown off into as much of a rage for a $50 reinstatement fee, or if he'd be like me, pissed off at the "business agreement" being unilaterally rewritten at a later date. Either way, the gmail biz model does appear to be superior to the play/wallet/app store biz model, at least GOOG would get some revenue, however little.

I assume based on evidence Google dropped the "don't be evil" motto a long time ago.

Do you really think Gmail's business email is collecting arbitrary one-time fees of 50 cents on minors' accounts? Is this really any more than a rounding error compared to advertising revenue, charging for extra space, and providing email services to companies and schools? The whole $0.50 thing may be a scummy tactic, but it really doesn't seem to be their business model.

Perhaps my choice of phrase "business model" was inaccurate, but the core message stands, that in summary one part of google operates under the "any problem can be fixed with a credit card" outlook on crime and punishment, and another part of google operates under a brutal inhumane lifetime banhammer model, a capital punishment with no trial or appeal judicial model. Its an interesting inconsistency.

This is ludicrous. Do you have any evidence to back up any of this?

A complicated question to answer.

First of all you have a technical win because I screwed up, this was months ago, and its thirty cents not fifty cents.

On the other hand, if you won't google for "gmail locked out of account 30 cents" yielding "About 676,000 results (0.96 seconds)" although only the first hundred or so results are relevant, there's nothing I can do to help you or convince you.

It's all from 3 years ago and they all say it was a defect in the age calculation. That doesn't sound, as you state, like a deliberate system to generate revenue.

I know lots of people don't know how to setup an email server. But gmail, as an email account, is worth less than $10/month. And, in fact, your ISP probably includes several email accounts with your internet service. If your child needs an email account, just assign him one...

If you have Verizon, here's how... [8 extra] http://www.verizon.com/Support/Residential/Internet/HighSpee...

If you have Comcast, here's how... [5 extra] http://customer.comcast.com/help-and-support/internet/adding...

If you have Cablevision, here's how... [4 extra] http://optimum.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/1673/~/c...

So, in point of fact, gmail - as a 'free' email service - is actually a huge additional COST, considering the payment in privacy. And this is why I do not use it myself...

I advice against using your ISP's email service. What happens with your email address when you switch providers? Are you going to mail all your contacts with your new email address and update it at every service you ever registered for?

I agree, if the email account is going to be used for long term purposes. However, an email account for someone at the high school level should be fine. Presumably, the kid is going to go to a college somewhere - and will use the college account until such time as the kid graduates and moves on into the 'real' world -- whatever that means. I'm just trying to say that a gmail account for a kid isn't a necessary burden that needs rescuing at even the meager upfront cost of $0.50... plus the massive cost in lost privacy - which is an ongoing fee into the indeterminable future...

This is terrible advice. Why tie yourself to your ISP like that? What if you want to switch ISPs, or need to switch ISPs?

No offense meant - but why tie yourself to a huge multinational corporate entity that sells your privacy to whomever, whenever, and forever - so that you, the user, can have email or know where the next coffee shop might be... The cost of using Google's services is not nothing. And while some here may be aware of that, and accept that - the generalized user is not fully aware - even if told...

There are several reasons not to use Google's services, but there are even more reasons not to sign up a minor for Google's services. It's useful to look at the issue from Google's point of view... Google's terms of services are meant to be taken seriously - they track you, and tell you they track you. If a parent signs up a child for these services, the parent is giving Google the right to track that child - if the services are tied to a mobile platform - the parent is giving Google the right to track the location of that child --- and Google has every right to assume that the child is not a child, but an adult, as that's in the terms of services --- thus, a parent signing a minor child up for Google services is giving away the child's anonymity and privacy, for pretty much forever --- that's a pretty big decision, and I would want my children to make that decision for themselves after trying to understand the long-term consequences.

Yeah, those are all legitimate problems with Gmail, and valid reasons to switch... but not to your ISP's email system, which (for most people) has the same problems and is probably much worse.

> I continued to be an Apple fan until they announced the “walled garden” and the app review process for iOS. I am totally against having to get permission from a corporation to write and sell apps (...). All Apple products are banned in my household to make a statement about programmer freedom.

> Now my Google play account and Google Wallet account are both banned for life. I’m no longer able to write Android apps ever again, and my family and I can’t even use Google wallet to purchase from Google Play.

So much for programmer freedom. Apple is at least very explicit about its rules. Google seemingly lets you do whatever you want, but then bans you if you do something that they don't like. Now of course one can say that the ban is justified, as author clearly misused the Play store and didn't follow the guidelines.

If he did try to do that on the App Store his apps would be probably instantly rejected, but he would not be banned. The funny thing is that there's a big chance that he would then write a blog post about how App Store is a "walled garden" and that on Play store that would be OK.

The rule is explicit: it's called trademark law. You can't just copy the name and logo of another company, append " TV" and distribute it publicly.

This is an official app of The Verge: http://www.myappwiz.com/home/getapp?platform=Ios&appID=54251...

This is OP's unofficial app: http://www.myappwiz.com/home/getapp?platform=Android&appID=c...

It's pretty clear that this is prone to cause confusion, even with the disclaimer.

Quotes from the article:

"Why didn’t you give the apps a different name?

Well since Google was silent about the exact reason for suspension, I didn’t know what I needed to do. Was it the app name? Probably, but I didn’t know for sure."

If Google does not inform you in detail that it was the trademark that was violated, they have no right to ban you on that reason.

While you might be able to argue that they should inform you in detail, that is not the argument that you have advanced here - you state that they have "no right" to take this action. In keeping with the spirit of your post, what are the requirements that Google must comply with in order to have the "right" to ban you, and how is that set of requirements determined and modified over time?

> If Google does not inform you in detail that it was the trademark that was violated, they have no right to ban you on that reason.

They have no obligation to inform you and they have every right to ban you whatever the reason is ,it is stated in the TOS you agree on when you register as a developper on Google Play. You want information? hire a trademark,copyright attorney.

It's up to you to make sure your business is legit before hand.Google doesnt owe you anything. It's their plateform. If you feel they violated contractual obligations, sue them. Just dont complain you were not informed. Misinformation can never be a proper excuse in any case.

My next business venture definitely needs to be 'common sense as a service'

But the initial app suspension email from Google did say he was violating trademark.

But which one?

The only thing that seems odd here is that Google appear to be proactively defending other companies' trademarks. Shouldn't the Khan Academy or Vice have been the ones to send the takedown notices? Or perhaps they did behind the scenes and this manifested itself in the app bans.

Isn't it in Google's interest not to have a store filled with spammy stuff that confuses users?

Well no; as far as those companies are concerned, Google is hosting those apps and is responsible for them. Google then by extension goes after the author of the app. Similar to Youtube; content owners just went after the hoster (youtube), not the uploader.

I’m no longer able to write Android apps ever again

Well, this isn't true. You don't have to use Google Play to distribute your app - unlike with Apple, where you do have to use their store (unless you like personally managing users' ids)

Apple is far from explicit about the rules. It's entirely possible to submit the same app (or almost-identical apps) twice and have one rejected and one approved. And they're no clearer about the reasons why something was rejected than Google is.

If you ever find yourself making this argument:

I didn’t think they would mind, I thought I was doing them a favor. Pointing people to their great content. It’s free advertising

then stop. Other people don't want your "free" advertising.

Microsoft was known as the Borg, but that was poorly placed. Google has been more of a Borg than MS ever was.

Google has decided to automate everything. There is no way to get actual help across their entire product line. Having problems with your adwords account? It doesn't matter if you spend $20K month, you get automatic email responses to your queries with obnoxious links to the help system that you've already read.

While I agree that author did more wrong than he realizes, he also asked Google for an explanation to their objection, to which he received no response. I guess the Borg NLP engine was down that day and couldn't find the appropriate form letter.

Whatever you think about this author, you can't deny the danger of relying on one ecosystem so heavily. Google is the worst. At least Apple would have denied his app with a reason which he could have corrected.

Summary: No sympathy for the blog author, but its still terrifying how broad Google's ban-hammer can be if you run afoul of them.

idk, these are a bunch of products I barely even knew about.

I thought google wallet went away around the same time google wave did, for instance.

It's the only way you can buy content (apps, music, books etc) and devices from the Play Store. If you use Android, not having a functioning Wallet is extremely limiting.

He was definitely in the wrong (by using logos and names without permission for starters) and ignorant of basic trademark and copyright law (which many of us probably are too!), but I also worry about two things:

- Google's continued lack of communication (most everything is automated),

- and their ban-hammer (much like Paypal's, it can be terrifying for a small developer).

BTW, he added the following disclaimer to his app (not that it did much good):

"DISCLAIMER: The Verge TV App is not affiliated with The Verge. Information shown in this app is obtained through public YouTube APIs. We are fans of The Verge and we wanted a better viewing experience to watch their videos.

Any copyrighted material belongs to the original owners. If you want changes made to this app, please let us know."

I want to use (for example) photos and names of cars for an app - do I need to get permission from the brand owners?

March 25th post that was on Hacker News at least twice already. This is the only article on his blog.

Here is hi github page: https://github.com/sgehrman He is still developing. I am wondering what the updated status is on this? Seems that if he is still developing he isn't banned for life?

There already were some petition at https://www.change.org/petitions/sergey-brin-respect-the-eff...

So that petition is accusing one dude in Google of disrespecting 'small and indie android developers' when they're blatantly violating trademark law? Lols.

Never underestimate the pariah complex...

While it'd be nice for Google to explain why he was banned, it already sounds like he understands why he was banned but he had a chance to grand-stand so he's on his soapbox.

I started laughing at the bit about all Apple products being banned in his household to make a statement about freedom, and I just didn't stop.

After just skimming through the post, I have a question for OP. Why did you create 10 different apps? Why not just one app, that gave the user the ability to enter a channel name and check out all their videos? I think that's better, both in terms of not spamming — for the lack of a better work — the Play Store, as well as UX.

I'm afraid the actions taken by Google in this case can be justified, since publishing 10 apps a day is a dubious figure. However, I'll give it to you, they could've made the regulations regarding this a little more explicit and visible.

Why not just one app, that gave the user the ability to enter a channel name and check out all their videos?

According to the article, that's what he was working on after releasing the 10 apps.

However, I'll give it to you, they could've made the regulations regarding this a little more explicit and visible.

It's called trademark law. It's very explicit that you can't copy the logo and name of another company.

Has anyone read the list of other developers who've gotten suspended?

> http://blog.hutber.com/how-my-google-devlopers-account-got-t...

This guy here writes an app called "Sex Diaries Alpha", and has it rejected because of pornographic purpose. He then assumes that its because he used a picture a cartoon donkey as the icon, so he reploads "Sex Diaries Test" with a picture of a cartoon girl instead.

More repetitions follow. He never once thinks its perhaps the name 'sex diaries' or the stated purpose of the app. Nope, maybe its the fact that this picture has a nipple, or this is cartoon bondage.

> http://andrewpearson.org/?p=681

This guy writes an app and stuffs it with 100s of keywords (as one could see by checking the same app in the 3rd party app store), then he complains he isn't in violation because you could play all those artists through his generic music player, and google didn't cap the number of keywords you could use. So he's not in violation. He knows this for sure, because he's an attorney.

> https://groups.google.com/forum/#%21searchin/android-develop...

This guy says that Google transfered $4000 of android sales into his adsense account so they could pay him for non-US sales, but they failed to verify his account since he didn't have $10 worth of adsense budget. Then they disabled the entire account due to invalid clicks on a dead-end blog. If his story is actually true, he should get a lawyer and I feel this is really the time that Google customer service would be nice.

...and thus, the natural consequences of walled-garden markets begin to rear their ugly heads.

It was all love and rainbows while the gold rush held it promise of instant richness and fame, wasn't it?

It's an unfortunately common idea that copyright violation is sometimes okay because it amounts to "free advertising" for the organisation whose content you're co-opting. I was disappointed to see that argument made here.

I wouldn't call the OP blameless but there is a lesson here: it is dangerous for a professional software developer to become too invested in one technology or platform, especially with a capricious corporate overlord behind it.

I understand that an app is content wrapped around a concept. It is common sense not to use a known name unless you are asking for trouble. I could make a news app. Do I want to name it CNN? No, unless I am authorized to use that name. It is naive to think you can use just any name, even if you meant good. You are looking for trouble. Next time call it something else. The video app. Learn by Watching...I mean you couldn't come up with another name?

The problem is he specifically tried to figure out if that was the problem and google wouldn't say. Perhaps he got the banhammer for not getting using a (TM) after the brand name in the descriptions. Perhaps he's actually in trouble for not getting permission for some of the content in the screenshots. All of that is probably a good idea. But specifically, he will never know why he got the banhammer and we will never know either.

The problem with whatever-as-a-service business model, is you're never worth more than a penny more to the provider than the cost of sales to replace you when/if you leave. So, people are throwing themselves at google to be an app dev, so I guess he's worth precisely nothing at all to GOOG.

A business relationship where one side is worthless to the other is best described as parasitism and often that doesn't turn out well for the parasite. That is the true lesson for all app developers to learn from this story. An inherent part of the biz model is you can get annihilated and the host (host as in parasite lifecycle model) will not care. Make sure you understand that, when making business decisions.

I think the best comment, which was buried in the replies was this:

"There is a guide and it's pretty clear: https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ... - For example, if your app displays the brand, icon, or title from another app [...] your apps can be suspended and your developer account terminated."

Don't believe you

You were a die hard Apple fan boy since '85 even during their darkest times... then you can't provide your users updates within hours so you...

"threw out my macs, smashed my iPhones, switched my whole family to Ubuntu and Android."

http://www.reactiongifs.us/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/dont_b...

Ha, yep, stopped reading at that. "The walled garden upset me so much I hulked out and destroyed thousands of dollars of my family's tech."

I'll be a pedant and point out that bit of hyperbole has a bit of an odd timeline issue. It seems to say he jumped ship to Android when the app store was announced. But iPhone OS 2 which introduced the walled garden app store came out before Android 1.0.

Plus, if you're so worried about things like walled gardens, why buy a phone that doesn't officially allow third party native apps like the iPhone with v1.x OS?

If it's true (and probably even if it's not), OP seems like an enormous pain to be around, both personally and professionally.

A lot of people think that the author deserved the punishment for his stupidity. However, I think he had an important point that needs to be discussed: that he was dismissed without a fair hearing and was banned for life from services unrelated to the one on which he committed the offense.

I think this is a growing problem that more people need to be aware of. We do not have the right to use modern marketplaces (such as the Google Play Store, Apple App Store, Google Adwords, AirBnB, Ebay, Uber, etc.) Instead, we have permission from corporations to use them. If an individual bases his livelihood on sales through one of these and then makes a mistake, the company is likely to ban him, destroying his income. There is currently no guarantee of due process or proportional punishment. When you are banned from the majority marketplace, one often has no real alternative. Can anyone make a living selling his goods on the second most popular auction site?

I think we need to fight for the right to due process and fair punishment online.

"I was a die hard Apple fan since 1985 and was an Apple developer all through the darkest days of the Apple death spiral. I continued to be an Apple fan until they announced the “walled garden” and the app review process for iOS. I am totally against having to get permission from a corporation to write and sell apps, and I certainly don’t think I should be forced to sell my work through their store and their store only."

Regardless of the merits of this particular authors' case, I'm frankly astounded that more people don't seem to care about this aspect of mobile platforms. I remember the uproar the Microsoft caused in the 1990s with their "trusted computing" trial balloon, and the uproar that locked PC BIOSes continue to create today. Yet you change the form factor a little and nobody cares. Wow.

I think you missed the part where Microsoft and Apple had completely different core businesses.

I'm talking about how mobile platforms are completely locked down and gated, with app stores taking ~30% of your app revenue and no ability to install what you want.

That sort of thing would never have been tolerated in the PC world, yet in the mobile work nobody seems to care.

Would they have cut off his Nest? If google since G+ thinks of itself as a single product, it might not be smart to let them into your house, or to depend on them for anything important.

That being said, these kinds of apps are what make the phone app market a cesspool. Would the iOS app store accept youtube channel viewers?

Google's culture of automated customer service continues a long tradition of poor people skills, and disdain for feelings and livelihoods, as well as their own reputation. I was contemplating switching from AWS to the Google Cloud, but it's posts like this that remind me that, oh yeah, I myself have been unjustly banned twice from one of their services.

Google cannot be trusted to handle relationships, whether with developers or companies. It's clear that they don't care and that's fine. They have their niche for providing services to those who don't mind the lack of the human touch. Just not for me.

Google is extremely well known for poor customer service in account management. That should not surprise anyone at this point. Automated bans and automated denial of appeal are pretty par for the course from the stories I've read.

That said, I'm not sure I actually side with the author outside of that point of agreement. Looks like the apps were mega shady.

I would advise the author to (1) not place their trust in a corporation again, and to secure their business & personal affairs against single points of failure, (2) not make shady software, and finally (3) consult a lawyer on the implementation of the law and contracts.

1. Don't repackage other people's content. Especially with their trademarks attached. If they had no role in creating the app, don't be a jerk. If you want to make a video app, make a general-purpose video app and teach your users how to add channels.

2. I can't help but appreciate the karma angle of someone who tried to repackage web content as apps getting bitten by the gatekeepers of the walled garden.

3. Ah, Google, the business that would certainly still exist (and be as large and powerful as it currently is) had it been forbidden to ever skirt the limits of copyright law...

I don't understand his whole logic. He publishes the same app 10 times for different channels. One after another gets banned and he even thinks this proves that the rest is OK. He says that he made "beta apps written for my kids", but he puts it on the biggest app store in the world. He says an app to display videos is worth 50.000$, 10 times the same app is worth 500.000$. He says it was a free project, but he made it to collect user data for his commercial project.

It's pretty clear to me.

First, what the guy did was wrong, and he appears pretty stupid, pretending to be stupid, or both.

Google is generally known for their abysmal communication and "customer service", but in this case they were in fact pretty clear about the problem right when the first app got suspended.

He can whine all he want but Google's decision to ban his Android developer account was not too unreasonable.

However even with that in mind I do believe that they went completely overboard with the decisions to also ban-for-life his Google Wallet and Google Music accounts. Those are completely unrelated to this matter[0], and escalated this thing out of proportion.

It is kind of frightening they will just take those things as "collateral" for violating a bunch of rules on a completely different service that just also happens to be part of the Google ecosystem. It starts to become and look like a state that way (hello, cyberpunk future), but with a state you should also have clear rules and ways of appeal. Google definitely doesn't have a meaningful version the the latter.

People depend on all sorts of services that Google provides, and the ability to take all or any of them away (there are no laws) because you violated an unrelated rule, is an amount of power that should come with mechanisms that keep it in check.

Indeed what if they instead had taken his GMail account?

[0] unless there is more that the author is not telling us, which is not at all unlikely.

The author should also do a quick search (perhaps with bing, DuckDuckGo, or Yahoo) on PayPal accounts being blocked. He recommends this as the safe option, trusted option, but I have seen more PayPal banned for life rants than google ones. With PayPal you can loose your account just because your customers are using stolen cards.

The lesson should be that basing a business on any single external resource could be an issue, and you should approach it carefully.

Apple is banned in the household, because walled garden, and yet he doesn't see the Google Play Store as a walled garden... oh boy, this guy is going to go far.

"Because I had listened to the leaders at Google say that the open web, open source and freedom are important values at Google, and I fully agree with that ideal."

"All Apple products are banned in my household to make a statement about programmer freedom."

"I believe in freedom, not blind obedience."

This guy comes off as being a bit naive. And/or dishonest in his telling of this story...

I stopped reading at "So, I threw out my macs, smashed my iPhones, switched my whole family to Ubuntu and Android." (Because nobody does that, specifically the first two things.) BTW until this line I was relating strongly with the author and especially the stuff about supporting a family.

Never got to find out the meat of the story. Oh well - it was promising and I was looking forward to it, I kind of wish I didn't realize what I was reading. (i.e. a fabrication.)

Basically, I don't find the sentence credible, nor am able to read it in context as an exaggeration or metaphorical, it's presented as fact, and I lost interest.

This is written by a marketer, not a developer. i.e. it's "a paid lie" (if we are cynical), or more generously it's allegory, that I don't have time to read. None of this stuff happened, in my judgment.

Granted I didn't read the 3900 word essay so I could be wrong - I stopped at word 278. It's just my impression that this story takes you for a ride.

Google's 'normal' support is horrendous and it takes forever to get someone to even pretend to help you. We had a paying google app engine account for our company... I've dealt with them, and it`s a pain to say the least. Now I can only imagine how they treat people who they consider 'deliquent' (not saying that the author is one)

I'm absolutely astonished by the degree of egocentric delusion, arrogance and lack of self-criticism displayed by the author:

* he smashes thousands of dollars worth of equipment because the producer's business model no longer fits his idea of freedom,

* he writes a trivial wrapper app with no original content or behavior,

* he spams Google Play with ten versions of it hard-coding different YT channel IDs in each,

* he values this contribution to the Android ecosystem on about $500,000,

* his apps obviously infringe on trademarks and possibly copyrighted content,

* he ignores multiple warnings and app suspensions, because they don't tell him precisely what to change,

* he considers Google to be under the obligation to handhold him through the nature of his violation of the terms and conditions,

* after all this he continues to think he is in the right,

* he writes a rant and expects to receive sympathy riding on general disappointment in devs community with Google's admittedly lacking customer support.

Wow.

The OP made some grave errors with his apps. But is it really a good reason, to not tell him, what was going wrong and instead swinging the big hammer on his head (life-long ban)?

Google once started with the slogan "Don't be evil".

By being the new "Judge Dredd" of the internet, it can just become, what it never wanted to be. All that, just because Google tries to drive technology to its extremes ("customer-service from hell").

This is going to be more and more important, because there exist only very few major app-stores and very few major internet-payment systems (gladly, there the situation could still change to the better). But I know, how much Paypal was criticized because of his behavior and being a semi-monopolist in internet payments.

With our today's trend to centralization -- I don't want to put my fate into the hand of one of these new Judge Dredds.

They did tell him, didn't they? They told him 3 times.

As much I understood, they did tell him not enough, that he could understand what was wrong. Automated eMails are "customer-support from hell".

I have no experience with google customer support as a normal developer[1], but I guess there is a vast amount of this kind of arguably spamy apps submitted every day. On that scale it's probably hard and too time consuming to distinguish naive from fraudulent developers.

For me its difficult to believe, that someone who has been a developer for so long, really didn't think, that using another companies name in an app name, use their logo – and removing their ads(?)[2] – couldn't lead to some sort of serious problems.

The punishment might be too harsh, but defending yourself in this case with 70/80 rebelism and doing them a favor with "free advertisement" is just bizarre.

[1] I've worked in the advertisement team of the biggest swiss news site, and we got decent personal support from google. Unfortunately, i guess it is as always in life: If you're big, others will listen to you. If not, you'll be ignored.

[2] "No ads, no junk, just videos" http://www.myappwiz.com/home/getapp?platform=Android&appID=c...

Googles' model is to allow apps without pre-screening. This model (trust but verify) lends itself to having more spammy apps submitted to it (no proof, just an educated guess). Google is providing a gateway for others to generate income.

The OP stated: 1) They had a disclaimer in multiple places. 2) They reached out explicitly because they weren't sure where the real problem existed. 3) Only one app was notified at a time when multiple apps had been following the same style and none were notified until later. Surely Google would want to investigate whether the developer posted any other apps which might be in violation? 4) Was not trying to nor had any interest in making any money off of this set of apps.

It has been said, the OP was naive and should have pulled the apps after the first notice since they were just beta. But any corporation that is providing business support services really needs to fund a customer service desk with real people. The fact that people use google for businesses like this knowing this situation is really surprising.

I knew I'd seen this before. It looks like Medium's wacky URL structure is bypassing the dupe checker. If you search for the hex code at the end[1], you get the previous discussions.

From when this was first posted in March:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7478975

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7569454

From May:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7855337

[1] like this: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=c62f2404f66#!/story/forever/0/c62f...

He wants to know the difference between an app and the web: see Chubby Checker settlement.

I used to make Android themes back in the day. I would wait until a game got really popular on iOS and count on Android users checking the Android app store for the same titles. I'd sell an "Angry Birds" phone theme for 99 cents. Many Android users werent that technologically savvy and thought they were buying the actual game. This went on for about 6 months. I was making serious money. Eventually they caught on and I was banned from the store. I was a kid and doing something a bit douchey but I definitely understand banning me.

This guy doesn't quite seem to feel the same way.

Is there anyway to call google help directly? I've heard plenty of stories of google automated email support that never adequately explains anything, but I'm curious if you can actually call them.

If anyone has seen the movie "The Internship" there is a scene where they all have to learn how to do phone support. I would find it very weird if that is entirely a lie and it is nearly impossible to call them.

Also he smashed his apple devices because he disagrees with their ideals? That seems kind of immature.

He could sell the app outside the Play Store, of course. Nothing can stop him from doing that (trademark issues aside) and collecting payment via PayPal, etc.

I had this happen to me with adwords, once you get your account suspended or even before that, it is hard to get anyone to talk to you or have a way to correct issue. If you are fresh at it and clueless you are almost certain you will be banned.

Mostly this is due Google not having customer support, so you are just interacting with machines.

It would be easier if we had more options, this way if you get kicked out by apple and google, nothing else is left.

> The suspension email stated that I was trying to impersonate another company, and that this was forbidden.

> I decided on “Vice TV”

> I didn’t plan on trying to sell Vice TV

> I was also secretly hoping I would get a contract job out of this or someone might say, “Hey, add my blog and Facebook pages and I’ll buy the app from you.”

The last quotation isn't necessarily in context with the third one, but nonetheless this guy was either stupidly naive or ignorant.

Regardless of how you feel about this particular case, there are two things that are troubling:

1. Google is big enough to be an indispensable part of your life.

2. Google doesn't believe in allowing human contact - it doesn't scale. They've put all their eggs into the algorithm basket, and when the algorithm decides you're guilty that's it. No appeal, at least not in any real sense.

It's a story that gets repeated over and over.

The escalation from written warning to banned for life is a huge leap to make in one step.

A month long suspension would get the point across.

That this guy was banned from Google Play is meaningless. He would have been banned from the iTunes Store as well for apps like this. This post is just getting traction because it's Google and HN has an axe to grind against them.

He is wrong. But the technology giants wield way too much power and must be tamed.

Yeahh.. I'm finding it really hard to have much sympathy here. Spammy single-content-source apps like this are a plague upon the store.

Furthermore, the author's ignorance of trademark really doesn't win them any points.

The ignorance hurts my bones.

If he spent even 5 minutes looking at the ios sdk, he'd see that there's no review process involved in distribution of beta apps to customers...

Google is a bully to say the least and they are not as open as you might think, i learnt this when my adsense account got suspended.

The TL;DR should be:

Google suspended my Google Wallet account when they shouldn't have.

I love how the tl;dr bit is at the end of the article. If I were too lazy to read the entire article, why would I scroll to the end before closing?

"If one of their algorithms thinks you’re a bad guy, you’re banned for life."

In his case scratch out "thinks" and put in "knows"

TL;DR version "Didn't read the rules, broke the rules, :("

Duh.

Honestly, why don't you just use a friend's account?

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