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Alexander,
I realize that most of your post was rhetorical, which is good, since I don't have any answers for the questions you've posed. My response was mostly informative.
Obviously, "someone" must have read the messages that violated Gmail's TOS. However, that does go against their statment that no human is reading your email. I also refuse to believe that their search technology is *that* good. as the RIAA and such have proved, searching for filenames just doesn't cut it and, as you indicated, requires AI or "human" levels of decision-making.
It's possible that there's some technology that reports possible infringements, sucks the content out of the email, thus separating it, if only temporary, from the person sending/recieving it and delivers it to a human to decide if it's a violation. That would put Google in the position of not actually reading your email, but still be able to prevent infringement. The possibilites range from software we're unaware of (like the scenario above) to outright lying to the userbase (something I don't put any company above doing).
However, without a statement from Google, it's impossible to tell. Even with that, it's even more difficult to tell if that statement, heavily PR'ed as it would be, is even the truth.
I think the grater "truth" that should be learned here is that email privacy is an illusion and, if your email privacy is that important to you, it's time to start researching encryption. at the very least, you shouldn't be using web-based email services.
A very intersting discussion, indeed.
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