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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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."):
>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.
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.
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
"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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
