The Adsense account was positively banned for linking to the Pirate Bay and Demonoid (sites that host infringing content and cracks) on every page of the site.
Then the Adsense account holder contested and received a positive explanation of: You offered links to pages on content-infringing domains.
No one, not even Google, wants to ban, or did ever ban, Adsense accounts, simply because the account holder used the Pirate Bay to distribute free stuff it owns the rights to.
I totally agree that there is a problem with the support channels. To me the REAL problem is: user breaking the rules, contesting, getting feedback about which rule he broke (the linking part), finally deleting the links, contesting shortly after again, account didn't get reinstated immediately, so user goes to the media and they twist it into an unavoidable, bad PR story of Google mistaking this guy for a distributor of copyright infringing material and offering no explanation or recourse.
As an aside: The Pirate Bay is inaccessible to many Dutch ISP users, when the courts deemed that the site mainly exists to facilitate copyright infringement.
Then the Adsense account holder contested and received a positive explanation of: You offered links to pages on content-infringing domains.
No one, not even Google, wants to ban, or did ever ban, Adsense accounts, simply because the account holder used the Pirate Bay to distribute free stuff it owns the rights to.
I totally agree that there is a problem with the support channels. To me the REAL problem is: user breaking the rules, contesting, getting feedback about which rule he broke (the linking part), finally deleting the links, contesting shortly after again, account didn't get reinstated immediately, so user goes to the media and they twist it into an unavoidable, bad PR story of Google mistaking this guy for a distributor of copyright infringing material and offering no explanation or recourse.
As an aside: The Pirate Bay is inaccessible to many Dutch ISP users, when the courts deemed that the site mainly exists to facilitate copyright infringement.