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Note that you can still access your files, they are not blocking that or restricting that. Its the sharing that's blocked.
by RegnisGnaw 5y ago
Note that you can still access your files, they are not blocking that or restricting that. Its the sharing that's blocked.
- Goronmon 5y agoYeah, to me this makes this kind of a non-issue. Because I always assumed that any cloud provider like this would be capable and willing to block sharing of files based on their policies.
- anshumankmr 5y agoBut seriously how long is it before Google implements a hashing algorithm (not too dissimilar from Apple's) to check if a user has not uploaded content with a copyright on it and taking some form of action on the user. This feels like a slippery slope to be on.
- throwaway0a5e 5y agoThey have been doing this since forever. Years ago if you tried to upload obviously pirated movie mp4s (like the most popular torrent for a given major release) it would error out.
- ugjka 5y agoWhat if you actually own the copyrighted content or have permission to have it?
- anshumankmr 5y agoOf course, that is an edge case which Google would need to figure out and perhaps, one of the many reasons they haven't done it.
- rurp 5y agoSadly I expect that Google will "handle" those edge cases the same way they handle similar issues on Youtube: have a lot of false positives and tell users to pound sand, except for cases where the outrage goes viral.
- jhgb 5y ago> that is an edge case which Google would need to figure out How do you figure out legality of having a document from the document? Unless it's child porn, where it's implicit, this simply isn't computable.
- anshumankmr 5y agoMaintaining a hash of say music files that are owned by large record label companies or a conglomerate like VeVo, match every audio file uploaded with the hash and if it matches, flag it, get it reviewed and if it matches, delete it?
- foxfluff 5y agoThat does not answer legality.
- anshumankmr 5y agoHowever, VeVo can say that no one can keep MP3 records if it isn't hosted on iTunes, YouTube Music or Spotify etc
- jhgb 5y agoIn my country that would be almost certainly illegal. Not even copyright holders can tell you what you can do with your personal copies of copyrighted works, short of distributing them to someone else. By law they're explicitly prevented from doing that.
- judge2020 5y agoAssuming for video content they use their existing YouTube Content ID library, they can exclude/allow their Google accounts to have that content, or host it under the same user as their YT channel.
- jevoten 5y agoIs it an edge case? Thanks to copyright's assault on the public domain, almost everything is copyrighted. Is making a backup of your movies, music, and e-books unusual?
- andi999 5y agoWhat assault on public domain?
- matheusmoreira 5y agoCopyright is supposed to be temporary. Instead terms have been extended to essentially infinite durations. The copyright industry has robbed us of our public domain rights.
- maxk42 5y agoWell they still haven't figured it out with YouTube.
- blueboo 5y agoStill might not have the license to agree to the necessary terms to upload it to a third party cloud storage
- kingcharles 5y agoThis is an issue that none of the cloud providers have solved. I had 250,000 CD rips from various record labels at one point. I had full authorization from them, but it looks like I'm a massive pirate.
- zuminator 5y agoIt should look like you're a massive pirate -- if you have hundreds of people downloading those CD rips from your Gdrive. If you're the only one accessing your own files, it shouldn't matter how many rips you have. Don't know how it works in practice.
- kingcharles 5y agoTo clarify, this was not a shared folder.
- ocdtrekkie 5y agoYou are assuming they do not already do this.
- anshumankmr 5y agoConsidering I have many pictures I took from the latest Spider-Man movie (for my own collection), if they had to do something about it from a legal perspective, they would have done it already.
- chillingeffect 5y agoit's way too easy to get around that. also, having copyrighted content is not illegal. it is legal to make backup copies of something. google has no way of knowing what kind of external agreements a user may have made regarding sharing. they might ban it anyway, but that makes other services who don't ban legal activity attractive. Those interested in google's slippery-slopes should look into "keyword warrants" [1] and "geofence" warrants [2] [1] https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/google-is-giving-data-to-police-based-on-search-keywords-court-docs-show/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/google-is-gi... [2] https://nlsblog.org/2021/01/08/google-data-and-geofence-warrant-process/ https://nlsblog.org/2021/01/08/google-data-and-geofence-warr...
- dharmaturtle 5y agoApple's CSAM would scan your offline photos. Google scanning photos you upload to their cloud seems fine to me. Not a slippery slope.
- fleddr 5y agoVery much a slippery slope. Their cloud doesn't mean its their content. If said content is public, I mostly agree, but not if its private. When I hire a storage box and put stuff in it, I don't own the storage box. Yet still it cannot be searched by anyone, not the company nor the authorities, unless there is a credible criminal suspicion.
- dharmaturtle 5y agoThe storage owner can have a terms of service - i.e. you can't store flammable material/liquids. They also probably reserve the right to enter your unit to perform repairs.
- fleddr 5y agoRight, and to keep this analogy consistent, do storage owners routinely open all storage units, then open up all your boxes and search through them to check for flammables?
- kevin_thibedeau 5y agoThey don't give out free storage. If you aren't paying with money you're paying with something else and you have no expectation of privacy when you agree to terms that say as such.
- dharmaturtle 5y agoNo, but that's primarily due to a lack of interest/manpower. They (probably) reserve the right to ensure that you aren't doing things that are against their TOS. There's (probably) no right to privacy.
- 5y ago
- kayodelycaon 5y agoThey already do the kind of scanning Apple was going to do. Only with far less privacy.
- chippiewill 5y agoGoogle already scans for CSAM on stuff uploaded to drive. The idea that they'd start using it for copyrighted material is a spurious claim considering they've made no indication of doing so in the past.
- artificial 5y agoGoogle drive already scans hashes. https://torrentfreak.com/google-drive-uses-hash-matching-detect-pirated-content/ https://torrentfreak.com/google-drive-uses-hash-matching-det...
- ehsankia 5y agoYeah, all cloud provides do, this isn't new. The only reason Apple's version was controversial is that they did it on your own device instead of their own server, but scanning files on cloud services is common practice.
- ravenstine 5y agoAren't you forgetting that Google already practices this with YouTube? The idea they'd apply it to Google Drive doesn't seem particularly spurious to me. It might end up not being true, but what exactly is farfetched about this?
- johnhowardstein 5y ago
- bobthechef 5y ago
- oefrha 5y agoAnd they’ve been blocking files exceeding a download quota (common for publicly shared pirated video content) for ages. Basically the quota is zero for certain files now.