Did Google illegitimately unpublish my app from the store? And can I sue them? I have an app with lots of downloads and 4.8* reviews on the Play Store for over the last 2 years. In the last update we submitted they decided to check the Privacy-URL as well. This URL was temporary offline due to website maintenance. The reaction for google was to not only reject our app update but also to take the existing app offline (unpublish?). No grace period, no questions ask, just point blank removal from the store. I fixed this issue within minutes after getting informed about the removed from the store and submitted a new App binary to get a new review going. Normally the reviews process in 1 day, this time it's approaching a week now. All this time our app is still offline. At the moment we're getting lots of questions from potential new customers that can't find our app since we're approach a week of being unpublished. My question: is it legitimate for Google to remove your app from the store without grace period when your privacy policy URL can't be reached? To me this seems like a crazy practice, especially if you consider that they are only checking these URL's during an app update review, and then removing your EXISTING app from the store. I e-mailed Google appeal board this to get clarification on this lightly taken desicion to take our company down. Hello, Can you tell me what is the official procedure for removing out of the play store. So for some reason the reviewing employee couldn't access the privacy policy and decided, without any grace period or any question asked, to remove the app from the store completely. This happened twice already. Can you imagine how frustrating this is to a start-up that tries to build a winning app? To be off-line, getting lots of questions from users? Or has Google become this kind of organization that can't reflect on their own practices anymore and we have to deal with Google as a unpredictable black box that can decide to remove your app for any reason at any time without even asking a question? Could you please really respond to this, and more importantly escalate this to management, because I really think this is a big 'sin' and it happened 2 times to me already. This never happened to us with Apple by the way where our app is listed as well. Since my app is in review now which can take up to 7 days, can you at least make sure my last version of the app is back in the stores ASAP, that is removed for NO reason? I just hope to get clarification if this is a common practice or that this was a mistake from an employee, I hope it's the latter one and appropriate actions are taken towards the employee. You can't take out business whenever you want. There reply just stunned me. I have no words. Thanks for your reply. We can process an app deletion only if the app meets all of the following criteria: App must be in good standing (not rejected, removed, or suspended) App must have 0 lifetime installs App must not be in review App must be unpublished for 24 hours As the status of your app is “pending”, we are not able to delete com.kiter at this time. Please let me know if you have any other questions or concerns about the Play Console. Instead of responding to my complaint/concerns they are sarcastically interpreting my question as if I'm asking to get my app completely deleted. So yes, Google has become this company where detached robot people are executing boring jobs, not giving a single shit about their actual customers. My question, is Google in the wrong here and can I sue them with good chances for illegitimate app removal + the financial impact of that on our company?
No, they did not. Yes, you can sue them but you won’t win You agreed that they could do this in clause 8.3 of your contract: If Google becomes aware and determines in its sole discretion that a Product or any portion thereof (a) violates any applicable law; (b) violates this Agreement, applicable policies, or other terms of service, as may be updated by Google from time to time; (c) violates terms of distribution agreements with device manufacturers and Authorized Providers; or (d) creates potential liability for, or may have an adverse impact on, Google or Authorized Providers (for example, if a Product has an adverse economic, reputational or security-related impact); then Google may reject, remove, suspend, limit the visibility of a Product on Google Play, or reclassify the Product from Google Play or from Devices. The power to determine if your app does this lies solely with Google. &quot;Sole discretion&quot; is a term of art which is no obligation on Google to act reasonably. Indeed, they may act arbitrarily - that is, they do not have to treat you the same as anyone else nor do they have to offer you procedural fairness/natural justice/due process. It also removes any obligation on Google to act in good faith. However, they may not act in bad faith - that is, they cannot act maliciously. So, unless they are deliberately persecuting you, then if they decide you broke the rules then you broke the rules.
Without a jurisdiction, I'll just say that unless the comments made in the reviews and discussions were false, the individual is unlikely to have any claim, particularly given that you've stated that this occurred over the course of a year. However, the individual may be able to argue that they were not given sufficient notice of their performance, for example through performance evaluations, and given the length of time, it likely that one would have occurred. A company may be able to terminate an employee in spite of their overall contributions if they have breached policy - for instance, an otherwise outstanding employee who attracts negative customer reviews based in fact, and who is given ample opportunity and guidance to improve, may cause brand and reputational damage to the company; in this case, it is a commercial decision to retain or terminate the employee. As for what recourse the employee has, if the comments were factual, then it is likely that they will not have any, unless the employer has not adhered to procedural requirements - for instance, in Australia, you are required to provide an employee the opportunity to have a support person present at any meeting which may result in the employee's termination - or the employer broke some other law - for instance, discrimination, bullying or harassment law. Unfortunately, the contributions an employee makes does not necessarily negate the harm they do, and complaints based on an employee's performance are completely valid if factual.
You Own The Code To answer your question on whether or not it is copyright infringement: Yes, you do own the rights to the written code but posting it on Github gives Github the right to store, archive, parse, and display Your Content, and make incidental copies, as necessary to provide the Service, including improving the Service over time. This license includes the right to do things like copy it to our database and make backups; show it to you and other users; parse it into a search index or otherwise analyze it on our servers; share it with other users; and perform it. To simply put it, no matter what license you use, you give GitHub the right to host your code and to use your code to improve their products and features. This license does not grant GitHub the right to sell Your Content. It also does not grant GitHub the right to otherwise distribute or use Your Content outside of our provision of the Service, except that as part of the right to archive your Content. So with respect to code that’s already on GitHub, I think the answer to the question of copyright infringement is fairly straightforward. Things aren’t quite as clear-cut in a scenario where Copilot is trained on code that is hosted outside of GitHub. In that situation, the copyright infringement question would hinge largely on the concept of fair use. If Copilot is being trained on code outside of GitHub, we accept that at least some of what they’re looking at is copyrightable work. So, the question then becomes if it’s fair use. Now, you ultimately can’t conclude definitively that something is fair use until you go to court and a judge agrees with your assessment. But I think there’s a strong case to be made that Copilot’s use of code is very transformative, a point which would favor the fair use argument. There is precedent for this sort of situation. Take the case of Google Books, for example. Google scanned millions of books, provided people who were doing research with the ability to search the book, and provided the user a small snippet of the text that the user was searching for in the book itself. The court did in fact find that was fair use. The use was very transformative. It allowed people to search millions of books. It didn’t substitute for the book itself. It didn’t really take away anything from the copyright holders; in fact, it made it easier for readers to access the work and actually opened a broader market for book authors. And, it was a huge value add on top of the copyrighted corpus. In the latter scenario, a lot depends on the thoroughness and the length of Copilot’s suggestions. The more complex and lengthy the suggestion, the more likely it has some sort of copyrightable expression. If a suggestion is short enough, the fact that it repeats something in someone else’s code may not make it copyrightable expression. There’s also the question of whether what’s being produced is actually a copy of what’s in the corpus. That’s a little unclear right now. GitHub reports that Copilot is mostly producing brand-new material, only regurgitating copies of learned code 0.1% of the time. But, we have seen certain examples online of the suggestions and those suggestions include fairly large amounts of code and code that clearly is being copied because it even includes comments from the original source code.
From what I can see on the USPTO registry, &quot;tweet&quot; is still not trademarked for the purposes you're talking about. Twitter has been working to secure that trademark, but I can't find any record of them having actually secured it. Just the same, I'd predict that using it will get you at least a cease-and-desist letter, and possibly a lawsuit. Whether you'd win that case seems to be a very open question, but that presumes you have the resources to litigate.
Hosting copyrighted material on your servers is probably a bad idea, but software that changes how such material is displayed is likely fine – and there already are tools doing similar things. For example, the news publisher Axel Springer sued adblocker maker Eyeo for copyright infringement in Germany in 2021, since the adblocker manipulates the contents of a web page. This was rejected by the court. (See summary by The Register which also provides US context, summary by Eyeo, actual ruling (in German)). Core argument in that case was that adblockers do not distribute protected works, and do not create derivate works of the website. They merely change how the website is interpreted by a browser. However, the details here are dependent on German copyright law and on the specific capabilities used by adblockers – it might not generalize to other scenarios. Some browsers (e.g. Safari, Firefox) offer a reading mode that strips out all website contents except the main content, and then displays it in a more legible fashion. This strips out all navigation, sidebars, ads, and so on. So far, I don't think this kind of functionality has been challenged. This existing reading mode sounds quite similar to the reformatting tool you're envisaging. There are similar tools available in many programming languages, such as the Arc90 readability project (software, archived website), which is in turn inspired by the Instapaper app. Read-it-later apps like Instapaper and Pocket do involve a bit of a grey zone though, since they involve server-side storage of articles.
The agreement linked in the question seems to be or to purport to be, for a non-final, non-production version of the board. I have seen such agreements used, both for hardware and software, used when beta-test versions of products are being distributed to those who agree to do such testing, often in exchange for a reduced price on the final product, or an early look. I have also seen similar language used when an evaluation version of a product is provided free, or at a much reduced price. In such a use, it would be a reasonable contract, it seem to me, and I see no reason why if it were agreed to by both parties in such a situation, it would not be binding. Often such agreements also include a non-disclosure aspect, but this one does not seem to do so. I cannot see how such an agreement could be made applicable automatically, without both parties having chosen to agree to it, and indicated this by signing, clicking, or in some other positive way. I doubt that it could be made automatically applicable, on an "by using this product you agree" basis. I don't know of any physical consumer product, or appliance, sold with such an agreement in ordinary commerce. I am not sure what would happen if a manufacturer wanted to require all purchasers to sign such an agreement. I don't know if it would be binding. I would think that the purchaser's rights under the First Sale doctrice, could be modified by a valid contract agreed to by the purchaser. I do not think that they could simply be revoked by a contract of adhesion, which the purchaser had no choice to decline before making the purchase. As the OP says this was not signed or agreed to in any way, I can't see how it binds the OP.
If there is a trade mark and if Polaroid owns it and if you infringed it then yes they can force you to remove it. In addition, they could sue you for either damages (i.e. what they lost because of your infringement) or an account of profits (i.e. what you made because of your infringement). That is what trade mark law is for! If the trade mark is registered then this is trivially easy for them to demonstrate. If it is unregistered then it becomes a question of if the mark is clearly recognisable as Polaroid's; IMO they could probably show that it is - those particular border dimensions were distinctive of Polaroid instant cameras for many years. If you want to republish the app, you could probably avoid trade mark issues by allowing users to set the dimensions of the photograph and border, the colour of the border and the location of the caption.
An app(lication program) is software run on the end-users machine. That does not fall under the GDPR. Any processing (including storage) you do on user data has to be compliant with the GDPR. Allows a user to authenticate via e.g. Facebook and stores some basic data (optional) Authentication via Facebook leaves GDPR compliance to Facebook (AFAIK). It would be a good idea to provide alternative authentication methods, such as Google and an "own account" user name and password so that the user doesn't have to share information with a multinational company in order to use your service. The "basic data" will need to be processed according to the GDPR. As long as the "optional" part is "opt in" (i.e. the user needs to at least click on something) then this means you have permission to process that data. Providing this "basic data" as a JSON or CSV file should meet data portability requirements. Allows a user to upload a GPX file (a route or some other activity) Stores the above file to Google's database Allows the user to analyze that file. Since the user is actively choosing to upload each file you have permission to do this. You should make it clear in your privacy policy that the data will be held by Google. Doing so should not be a problem as Google has set up the legal framework to do this under the GDPR. You don't have to store the information encrypted, but you should use encryption (e.g. HTTPS) for any data transmission. Allowing the user to analyse the file is not an issue; either the user is doing it on their own machine (GDPR irrelevant) or you are doing it under user instruction (meaning you have consent). Since the user has uploaded GPX files they already have data portability on those files. You should tell your users that while you will employ best endeavours you don't promise to keep their files accessible and they should maintain their own private copies. That way if your entire database gets corrupted they can't blame you for loss of data. Finally, make sure there is a "Close my account and delete all my data" option.