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This would seem to be a fairly monumental breach of the duty Google owes consumers.


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Wouldn't this basically be a form of economic tort? If so, I doubt Google would want to be on the receiving end of the legal consequences.

They could also sue Google for this violation.

It seems to me that Google could get into legal trouble if that was the case.

Against googles lawyers?

It would require a massive amount of pissed off consumers, and a huge team to even drag them to court.

End result would be google paying a pittance and no one getting anything.

End of the day, a lot of lawyers would be paid well and google would shrug it off as a cost of business.


I'm willing to bet that in their hundreds and hundreds of pages of terms and conditions there is a paragraph saying that by using their services you give up your right to sue Google for war crimes.

It might be enough to just have a class action lawsuit against Google requiring them to actually follow the actual DMCA process.

Entitled much? What obligations does Google have here, exactly?

Maybe you can sue Google for negligence.

I would totally want this too, but legally, can Google do something here when they are not a party in this litigation?

In this case it is Google's responsibility.

If Google isn’t legally liable for this under defamation statutes, maybe they should be.

As a huge public company providing services to consumers, any damages they could conceivably win would be dwarfed by the damage to their public image by doing it (not to mention the high likelihood of the suit failing, countersuits or scrutiny of other areas of their patent portfolio they'd really rather protect)

If I held Google shares I'd actually consider it a breach of their fiduciary duty for Google's management to waste resources and goodwill pursuing a suit over something so trivial.


Violating terms or not- it's still a lot of power for Google to hold over a person and there should be some consumer protections for this.

This might be reasonable if the aggrieved user has a right that Google violated. But that doesn't seem to be the case.

Really sounds like some sort of RICO or extortion charge should be filed against Google, assuming this is all 100% factual.

Yes. Google is violating practically every law of this type. They're allowed to do it because they have a lot of money.

What a joke. How could Google be liable?

I think if users could sue for this sort of thing Google would start doing that because it would be cheaper than fending off lawsuits.

Google could easily sue them into oblivion for libel. They would be forced to reveal the exploit during proceedings to prove their innocence.
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