[esrauch]

I feel like every single reply from them was about whether he held the copyright rather than whether he had the identity he claimed, and part of what went wrong is he kept asking about how to prove his identity in the replies.

I suspect what happened is they had some tag for what the content at that URL was and it wrongly was some other book, so the question wasn't his identity but the content's identity that had to be addressed. Their replies all look consistent with "the book at that URL is not the book you are claiming you own"

Not that their handling was good or clear, but to my eyes both sides were talking past eachother since he kept talking about his identity and the Google side wasn't disputing his identity.

[glenstein]

>I feel like every single reply from them was about whether he held the copyright rather than whether he had the identity he claimed, and part of what went wrong is he kept asking about how to prove his identity in the replies.

On one level I would say that simply flatly untrue given the phrasing of the emails from Google. But on another level, there's an integral relation between the question of identity and copyright ownership anyway, which I think makes that distinction moot in this case. Regardless of what you call it, they abandon the topic by the third email.

I think one of the things that makes factual issues difficult to accurately process is there's a lot of tempting paths towards minimizing cognitive dissonance by taking a both sides approach, and has the satisfying psychological effect of relieving tension while freeing one from the burden close comparisons of factual details and not feeling ugly by taking sides. There's obviously a lot of powerful psychology pulling us towards rationalizing an equilibrium. It's what makes fact-checking hard, because if you confront an asymmetry, it doesn't have the convenient relief from psychological dissonance that the brain is searching for.

[esrauch]

I'm surprised you can read Google's words as challenging his identity. Just looking explicitly again the emails:

> It is unclear to us how you came to own the copyright for the content in question, because you do not appear to be the creator of the content

Seems very explicit to me that the concern is "We don't think Jeff Starr owns the content that is at that URL" and not "we don't think you are Jeff Starr"

And then third reply was "your long multiple replies did not addressed our rejection concerns, and so you have failed the challenge script overall". I would really expect he could call a lawyer to restart the process in a way that would be worded less casually and have the necessary shibboleths for their challenge script to be passed.