"As bad, when the company acted, he stated, it would often remove pirated e-books but allow e-book pirates to remain on the site."
This tolerance of outright, blatant theft stands in striking contrast the draconian approach that Google takes to Android app developers who can be perma-banned without appeal from all of Google's services if they are even suspected of minor infringements of Google's policies.
"In May, Google stopped enrolling any new self-publishing authors."
And this is why we can't have (semi) nice things. I love reading crappy fan-fic and worse poetry.
The conflict inside Google runs pretty deep. On the one hand they see no problem in blatantly infringing on copyrights left, right and center, on the other they police their own rules as if they're the law of the land.
It seems a perfectly consistent criticism to me. Rather than do their due diligence, Google threw the baby out with the bathwater by shutting down the whole program.
Sadly that is unsurprising in a tech world that so often likes to pretend it's powerless to police its own content.
If Google (very many smart people, massive amounts of data, massive amounts of processing) can't do it then it seems like it could be a hard problem.
The abuse of ContentID on YouTube, or auto-generated DMCA requests, show that letting content owners report stuff doesn't work particularly well at scale.
"Hard"? Or just "expensive" and "not easily automated away"?
Because there's a difference.
In this case though, I struggle even to see how that applies. The examples given are literally cases of identical text content between pirated and real works. We've had text figured out for a while now, it's not like it'd take image recognition software to see that the diff between the two books literally amounts to two words for the bogus author's name.
Does it seem feasible to you to have every single published book checked against every other single published book and then to hire a whole department to handle disputes?
As the other commenter has mentioned, see how well that worked out for Youtube? People all over the Internet blame Google for the abuse of process that goes, ignoring the fact they have no choice in the matter.
Google would remove the pirated books, but not the offender's accounts, allowing them to continue selling stolen books.
>...then when they banned them, that was too much.
Google hasn't banned them. The existing pirate accounts are still in business. What Google did was stop the enrolment of all new self-publishing authors to prevent a small minority of potential new criminals. Google will take down those existing pirate accounts on an ad-hoc basis in response to complaints.
I shouldn't have had to spell this out when it is already made clear in the linked article. The contradiction really only exists in the somewhat uncharitable way you re-framed what I wrote.
This tolerance of outright, blatant theft stands in striking contrast the draconian approach that Google takes to Android app developers who can be perma-banned without appeal from all of Google's services if they are even suspected of minor infringements of Google's policies.
"In May, Google stopped enrolling any new self-publishing authors."
And this is why we can't have (semi) nice things. I love reading crappy fan-fic and worse poetry.