Jon Newton from the torrent site tracker P2PNet posted the latest take he has on Google’s assault on click fraud. P2PNet’s AdSense and Google search box were disabled after Google decreed the site violated its terms of service.

Newton has been having an on again/off again battle with Google over AdSense for some time. He wrote about his side of the story:

Newton also references ZDNet’s Donna Bogatin, who blogged that Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s view of click fraud was to “let it happen.” Google countered the argument with a lengthy response citing the quote by its CEO was taken out of context.

Newton dismissed the Google response as waffling on the whole topic of click fraud. In June, Newton wrote about the current AdSense outage that still persists with P2PNet:

That illustrates what has been perceived as a problem with Google and many other online companies: lack of communication. Google has maintained that sharing details of its click fraud detection program would assist fraudsters to defeat it, so it keeps the process in the dark.

Google likely sees its opaqueness as a valid position. Other people have claimed its approach to AdSense is flawed. Until Google finds significant impact on its multi-billion dollar ad revenue stream from customers leaving the program, their communication policies are not going to change.

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A publication of Interserver, Inc., run by John Newton, p2pnet was named in the suit alongside “John Doe, Jane Roe, Richard Roe, and Jane Roe,” all anonymous and still unknown commentators on Newton’s blog. The comments were directed toward Kazaa’s CEO Nikki Hemming in reference to a posting entitled “Nikki Hemming’s Money Mansion.”

The article relayed an Associated Press story about Hemming’s alleged sale of a multimillion-dollar Sydney, Australia mansion and funneling the funds to a tax haven in the islands of Vanuatu. The comments, listed in the suit by URL, are not currently viewable on the website.

Newton, who claims his website as a labor of love, says p2p.net brings in a very small amount of income. The costs of answering the lawsuit in court (to begin with), he says, are upwards of $30,000 Canadian. As such Newton will be setting up a way for fans to make donations for his legal defense while soliciting Canadian lawyers to take his case “pro bono”

Questions still remain in Canada and the United States about whether a blog publisher can be held responsible for libelous commentators. So-called “John Doe lawsuits” are becoming more prevalent from entities like the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), fishing ISPs for copyright violators, and SEO company Traffic Power, who sued Aaron Wall of SEO Book for similar reasons to Kazaa. The Traffic Power case was dismissed on jurisdictional grounds and the company did not pursue an appeal.

Some legal experts say the distinction may be made about whether publisher moderate the comments. If so, then that can be considered a form of editing, thereby becoming a choice of messages to convey. For others, the issue is about freedom of speech and not indulging companies in so-called “slap suits” filed to silence public detraction.

Critics applaud or assail the anonymous condition the Internet offers. While some think it is essential for free expression, others believe it opens up third parties to legal liability and shields criminals participating in unlawful or immoral conduct.

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Of course, Chapin isn’t saying how to pull it off. Chapin says the flaw is simple enough, so simple in fact, that it is easier to download the free, stolen track than to pay for it. Making this more useful, the stolen music is not truly from the Yahoo Music Unlimited service, but rather the music that costs 79 cents per song and comes without any copy protection or restrictions.

P2Pnet says they received an email from Yahoo where Yahoo indicated that after seeing what the problem is, they have determined that it does not expose any sensitive user information, just free music, so that it is not serious, although they are looking into how to fix it. Looks like Yahoo has its priorities in the right place.

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