Hard to disagree with any of the points Stallman listed but this stood out as especially egregious and petty.
>Google cuts off accounts for users that resell Pixel phones [0]. They lose access to all of their mail and documents stored in Google servers under that account.
>It should be illegal to put any "terms of service" on a physical product. It should also be illegal to close an account on a service without letting the user download whatever was stored there.
You make it sound like someone sold their used Pixel phone on Craigslist and then had their Gmail account banned - that's not what happened.
The Google customers had all bought the phones from the company’s Project Fi
mobile carrier, and had them shipped directly to a reseller in New Hampshire,
a US state with no sales tax. In return, the reseller split the profit with the customers.
Such an arrangement is against Google’s terms of service, which state that customers
“may only purchase Devices for your personal use [and] may not commercially resell any Device”.
From what I gather, a bunch of users bought heavily-subsidized phones intended for Google-Fi customers, shipped them to a commercial reseller who sold them at regular prices, then split the profit of a couple hundred bucks per phone. Doesn't sound very savory to me.
> “may only purchase Devices for your personal use [and] may not commercially resell any Device”.
If I buy something it's mine and I can do what I want with it.
It's like trying to devise a Will that controls what happens to one's estate after it is distributed to the inheritors. You're dead, and your stuff then belongs to other people.
> It's like trying to devise a Will that controls what happens to one's estate after it is distributed to the inheritors. You're dead, and your stuff then belongs to other people.
You can actually do that, although it is limited somewhat by the rule against perpetuities (RAP). The classic statement of the RAP is that no interest is good unless it must vest, if at all, not later that 21 years after some life in being at the creation of the interest.
For example, suppose you have three children and you own a small farm but do not live on it. You've got an arrangement with Farmer Bob that lets him and his family live on the farm and run it, and you get 20% of the profits.
In your will you could leave the farm to Bob for the rest of his life and then to your children and that would be fine. Bob's interest, if it vests, does so when you die, and that's within 21 years of your life and you were alive when the interest was created, so no RAP violation. You childrens' interests, if they vest, do so when Bob dies, which is within 21 years of Bob's life, and Bob is alive now so again RAP is satisfied.
So when you die the farm goes to Bob. When Bob dies it goes to your children (or if they are dead then it goes to whoever inherited their interest). (For those wondering what happens if Bob tries to sell the farm after he inherits it--he can, but he can only sell what he has which is an interest that terminates when he dies. That interest still terminates when he dies even if at the time someone else owns that interest).
In a majority of US states they have modified the classic common law RAP, replacing the within 21 years of a life now in existence with a flat 90 years. Some states have gone even longer in some circumstances, such as Florida which for trusts upped it to 360 years and then 1000 years. A handful of states have abolished the RAP.
Leave your stuff in a trust when you die and live in one of those states and you can dictate what happens to your estate for generations after you are gone.
> Leave your stuff in a trust when you die and live in one of those states and you can dictate what happens to your estate for generations after you are gone.
I'm all for crapping on Google, but I think the key term here is:
> may not commercially resell any Device”. (Emphasis mine)
The commercially reselling is probably in reference to buying a product for the sole purpose of reselling that product[0]. Of course, I'm no lawyer so maybe I'm completely misinterpreting that.
“I think Google should have banned them from future purchases, but taking away all Google services seems very draconian to me,” Eleff added. “Not allowing access to past data is even worse.”
I think most Google account owners would agree with the above sentiment.
The next claims is also misleading: "It should be illegal to put any "terms of service" on a physical product."
As you said, the issue is not that Google claimed some sort of ongoing right to block resale of the phone in the ToS, but simply that it refused to sell the phone to resellers to begin with. That's not attaching a ToS to a physical product, but just choosing who to take orders from.
Companies should not be running an internal justice department to sanction, through unrelated business wings, individuals who they have a dispute with, at most they should stop holding up their end of that contract while taking their grievance to the real courts. The only case in which that wouldn't be an option is the one where the resellers breached neither a contract nor a law in which case... why does Google think it can act against them?
> Such an arrangement is against Google’s terms of service, which state that customers “may only purchase Devices for your personal use [and] may not commercially resell any Device”
While you could certainly argue that's a ToS for the use of the store (not for the product itself), it's up to Google to identify resellers and not sell to them. If they fail to identify a customer as a reseller -- or hell, someone buys the phone and only later on decides to commercially resell it, or to sell it to a commercial reseller -- tough luck. That's just the first-sale doctrine at work.
Google taking punitive action against people who get away with this may not literally be "enforcing terms of service on a physical product", but it's muddy enough that I don't think the distinction matters. (Regardless, I think it's a big stretch to connect the ToS for store purchases to an entire Google account.) In any case, it's an incredibly scummy thing to do.
I agree it sounds like a violation of the terms, but the response seems asymmetrical to me. Banning them from using Project Fi in the future would be more appropriate.
Sure, perhaps asymmetrical. It also happened 7 years ago, and there's no similar stories I could readily find since. Perhaps Google also thought it was asymmetrical and scaled things back privately...
I also would easily believe these users probably didn't just buy a phone, and likely were using their personal Gmail account as a defacto business account - Pixel Arbitrage, as it were. In that light, banning the account outright makes some sense, even if it feels heavy-handed.
Google has too many services all linked to one account. Combined with their algorithmic banning of accounts, it is very scary. Having things like your YouTube account, email, business running on GSuite, servers running on Google Cloud, etc all tied to a single Google account that could get accidentally banned is terrifying.
Sure, maybe Google bans you for selling a Pixel phone, but that doesn't just ban you from Pixel. You're locked out of your entire business.
Or maybe Google bans you for making algorithmically determined bad comments on YouTube and now you're locked out of your entire business.
I find that entirely unacceptable.
They should really set up boundaries between various services and/or improve the ability to appeal account bans.
>Google cuts off accounts for users that resell Pixel phones [0]. They lose access to all of their mail and documents stored in Google servers under that account.
>It should be illegal to put any "terms of service" on a physical product. It should also be illegal to close an account on a service without letting the user download whatever was stored there.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/17/google-su...