No one's saying the bug is Google's fault, they're saying that taking advantage of the bug is Google's fault, because it is.

People are annoyed about it because it's stealing from the rest of us who do pay our taxes.

If you genuinely think there's an unfair advantage here, buy some GOOG stock. Then you'll be on the receiving end!

If I genuinely think someone's stealing, I should buy stolen goods to take advantage of the situation?

That's an interesting moral viewpoint!

Getting to keep your own money is stealing now? How Orwellian .

Keeping your money when you owe it for a service is, yes. It's called "theft of services".

EDIT: Perhaps I should put it more clearly...

If you sell goods on Google Play, I believe there is a fee of 30%. Now, imagine I found a bug in the Google Play store that meant that, even though I sold millions of copies of my app, I actually paid 0% to the Play Store. Do you think that Google would just accept that I'd found a bug in their software and therefore I owed them nothing? Do you think I owe them nothing?

Google chose to participate in a market where the costs were clearly labelled up-front and they didn't even have to pay a penny unless they made a significant profit!

Why the hell should they get away with paying nothing for a service that other people pay a lot of money for?

I suppose you're the kind of person who sends extra money to the Revenue if you feel your tax bill was unfairly low?

So (unethical) hackers are also completely blameless, after all it is in fact the software itself that allows this unintended access. Are you willing to endorse that statement?

If not, then Google is to blame for taking advantage of tax loopholes.

Consider the following:

* the software is designed by committee

* in the interest of greater acceptance, the committee solicits opinions of users for how to design the software

* some users need certain features, and the committee members are open to "suggestion"

* committee members have no issue with accepting suggestions without considering their impact

* committee members have no issue with accepting bribes in exchange for guarantees of certain features being implemented

* committee members actively solicit suggestions because they want money

* there are no repercussions for committee members taking bribes and blindly accepting feature requests, as a matter of fact it's official policy that they do so

Yeah, those "hackers" are definitely to blame here. They're playing the game by the rules and they're winning, and that makes you upset? Personally I'm not even surprised at all.

An analogous situation would be an NSA member sitting on a committee developing an encryption standard. The NSA member suggests a change that the committee members do not fully comprehend the implications of. They accept the standard and henceforth the NSA can crack the resulting cryptosystem. By your reasoning the NSA carries no moral fault here.

Man, the mental gymnastics people will go through to justify tax avoidance is astounding. Those with greater knowledge in an assumed non-adversarial system have a moral imperative to disseminate that knowledge to the others in the system. Otherwise taking advantage of the information imbalance and the other party's implied trust is unethical.

Just because something is legal does not make it right. Those who would outsource their moral thinking to laws are a sorry lot.

Morals and ethics have no say in determining whether to pay taxes -- if you pay too much then the government complains, if you don't pay enough then the government complains. Where exactly does right and wrong fit into this equation?

There are no mental gymnastics in determining how much taxes you have to pay, the only thing that matters is how much you pay.

>Morals and ethics have no say in determining whether to pay taxes

Morals/ethics do have a determination whether the concept of tax is ethical or not, which would then determine the ethics of avoiding said tax. If you take the position that tax is ethical (as a member of a society...) then it is at least on the surface unethical to avoid the intended tax rate (shifting burden, freeloading, etc).

It is impossible to undo the damage done by some forms of hacking. For example, if someone breaks into your email provider and publishes embarrassing emails about you in public, it would be impossible to undo the damage by any reasonable means. Tomorrow the lawmakers could pass a law stating that all tax not paid be returned to the government.

Also in a free market, governments should compete for companies to register their books in their respective countries and the competition between the governments should keep the tax rates fair.

Its not a "brilliant plan". Pretending that Bermuda "owns" your profits is borderline fraud. It may well be illegal too but no one has yet challenged it, though France may do.