[derefr]

Corporations see "complicity in an illegal act" as a negative utility far larger than the ultimate lifetime value of any single customer. So, when you do something illegal (even if for dumb reasons) and use a corporate service to do so, you've got to expect that said corporation will immediately try to distance themselves from complicity in that act by terminating your account with them. This is one of those "inherent in the structure of the free market" things.

[thanksgiving]

Why? Isn't this like a private storage? Unless people are sharing the files, why should Amazon care what's in the files?

[richmarr]

So, first of all I think you're focusing on the wrong thing.

The whole point of an unlimited tier is to attract large numbers of outsiders who don't want the cognitive burden of figuring out $/GB/month and estimating how many GB photos they'll need to store.

What we're talking about here is that they got some customers like that, but they also got a small number of customers taking them for a ride, call them 'power users' the kind of customers who (as we see elsewhere in these comments) won't stick around if the price changes.

There's nothing wrong with these power users storing huge amounts of data at subsidised price, just like there's nothing wrong with Amazon changing the pricing. They just decided to stop subsidising that behaviour and probably take a slight hit on a conversion rate somewhere.

As for your question about 'private' storage, it's a grey area. Privacy isn't absolute, especially in cases where a company is by inaction helping you breaking the law (whether you agree with the law or not). Companies work very hard to distance themselves from responsibility for their customers actions and don't want to jeopardise that by letting it get out of hand

[thanksgiving]

> Privacy isn't absolute, especially in cases where a company is by inaction helping you breaking the law (whether you agree with the law or not). Companies work very hard to distance themselves from responsibility for their customers actions and don't want to jeopardise that by letting it get out of hand

How does this work with Google Play Music (you can upload up to 50k songs for free and listen to it "on the cloud")?

I think you are focusing on the wrong thing. Corporations don't care about the law any more than individuals do. Laws and regulations are just guidelines if you are determined enough to get your way. Look at all the Uber stories. Pretty sure people here still like Travis for his tenacity no matter what you say about his morality.

I think we often forget that humans wrote the laws we have today. They didn't come to us in stone tablets down the mountain top. At the end of the day, these laws don't matter. They are not written in stone so as to speak. We should always strive to do better. Intellectual property is a sham. I mean think about it. I think there is legitimate intellectual property, the trademark.

I think it is wrong for me to sell "Microsoft Windows" (even if I wasn't charging any money) if I had modified the software and added malware into it. But me watching a movie or reading a book without paying royalties does not hurt anyone.

Please think about it. Just because something is legal does not make it right and just because something is illegal does not make it wrong. We need to calibrate our laws based on our image and not the other way round. We write the laws. The laws don't write us.

[richmarr]

> Corporations don't care about the law any more than individuals do.

I'm struggling to find a connection between the points that I made in my comment and the points in your reply. Suspect we have some miscommunication here... my own comment wasn't spectacularly well filtered.

I'll bite on these though;

> Laws and regulations are just guidelines if you are determined enough to get your way. Look at all the Uber stories.

Don't conflate civil or criminal law with the work of regulatory bodies, who in my experience with the FCA and OFT are very open and collaborative without any need for "tenacity".

Uber work very hard on marketing and competition, but they are allowed to succeed to regulators who WANT them to succeed despite their amoral hussle, not because of it. Regulators in my experience (the FCA and OFT specifically) are very open and collaborative. They understand that markets move on and regulations sometimes lead and sometimes follow.

> Please think about it. Just because something is legal does not make it right...

So, I'm assuming from this comment that you're quite young. Just for you information; I suspect most folks on HN are already aware of the delta between legality and morality.

I'd also recommend thinking about the subjective nature of morality, and the causes and malleable nature of it.