Aaron Greenspan got the standard email about having his account terminated and like many others Google didn't pay him the final balance of his account at the time - $721.00.

After not being able to get answers Aaron filed a small claims suit in Santa Clara for the 721.00 and he won. Lawyers aren't allowed in small claims court so Google sent a legal aid instead and they apparently made sure even the legal aid had no knowledge of why Aaron was banned.

The legal aid argued Google's case but with no specifics and without any documents to substantiate anything Aaron won the $721.00. The judge did not order Google to re-instate his account however, he remains banned.

Aaron Greenspan is President & CEO of Think Computer Corporation and it turns out that he did in fact blatantly break adsense TOS by having nothing other than one ad unit on a blank page of a parked domain.

He won because Google essentially choose not to bring any documents to court knowing full well that any data they divulge will lead to others reverse engineering those documents to find weaknesses in Google's policing system.

Adsense terms also state that any claim must go through Santa Clara CA, small court fees are $40.00.

I'd post a link to the source of this news but I don't think I'm allowed to post a link here. It's publicly available knowledge at any rate as are most court rulings.

I'm curious to see if this will open a floodgate of similar claims although I don't suspect a judge would look too kindly on having to preside over thousands of identical cases. I think something will need to be changed after this ruling and I'm willing to bet the Google legal team is working on that right now.

edit: If this was posted already it's not titled well and no text of the suit is searchable. I was surprised not to be able to find it posted here.

[edited by: JS_Harris at 10:40 am (utc) on Mar. 13, 2009]