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Pretty sure the problem is some users have Google Drive's with GBs/TBs of pirated movies, etc, that are shared massively. >Is it because you might share the fi

Pretty sure the problem is some users have Google Drive's with GBs/TBs of pirated movies, etc, that are shared massively. >Is it because you might share the files with someone that they have to consider anything put on Google drive as being redistributed under copyright law, and thus subject to copyright restrictions? Yes

rectang 5y ago
This seems like a fundamental design flaw for any cloud storage service which enables sharing. It would be a problem not only for Google, but for Dropbox, etc. There needs to be a sharp distinction between files for your own use and files that are shared with the world — as in a global setting for whole volumes to disable global sharing and thus avert the need for copyright scanning. If by making files easy to share at any moment, the service creates a need to perform continuous copyright scanning of all drive content and then to take punitive action when it is detected, then the service is really nothing like a private hard drive. The potential for catastrophic loss, not only of the drive contents but of everything you access through Google services, is much more terrifying than the possibility of corrupting a local drive and much harder to plan for.
- gerikson 5y ago
  >Dropbox has adopted a policy of terminating the accounts of users who repeatedly infringe copyright or whose accounts are subject to multiple infringement allegations. If you repeatedly share files that infringe others’ copyrights, your account will be terminate https://help.dropbox.com/accounts-billing/security/copyright-policy https://help.dropbox.com/accounts-billing/security/copyright... > There needs to be a sharp distinction between files for your own use and files that are shared with the world Even simpler: do not upload copyrighted materials to Dropbox, Google Drive, etc. Use a local backup if needed, use sneakernet to transfer files.
  - polski-g 5y ago
    What if you are authorized to have said copyrighted works?
  - chordalkeyboard 5y ago
    > Even simpler: do not upload copyrighted materials to Dropbox, Google Drive, etc. it is absurd for copyright to prevent a legitimate user from storing media on a cloud filesystem.
  - djsweet 5y ago
    > Even simpler: do not upload copyrighted materials to Dropbox, Google Drive, etc. As the article illustrates, it’s not actually that simple. Cloud services that terminate accounts (and probably instantly delete everything, to comply with GDPR, CCPA, etc.) for perceived copyright infringements will always and necessarily suffer from a false positive rate. We’ll likely never truly learn what this false positive rate is, but that it will always exist is reason enough to give pause to the thought that services should “just terminate their account” if they think it’s infringing on intellectual property laws. The only good answer here is an unqualified “Use a local backup”. The terms of use for non-business cloud storage absolve the providers of all responsibility for data loss, even when they have incorrectly taken punitive action against you.
  - rectang 5y ago
    > Even simpler: do not upload copyrighted materials to Dropbox, Google Drive, etc. This is more difficult than you are making it sound. Considering the way most people use their computers, the only way to avoid copyright infringement entirely in your use of cloud storage is not to use cloud storage the way you use your local drive but instead to assess every last file that you upload as if you were publishing it on a public website. Sure, you can avoid uploading pirated movies (perhaps by never downloading any of them in the first place). But in fact, original works are typically copyrighted by default as soon as they are created, even if the copyright is not formally registered — and we depend on a patchwork quilt of implicit and explicit licenses for viewing and use of files on the internet. Have you ever saved a quote from somewhere? That was probably copyrighted; your use is probably legitimate, but a naive algorithm might not think so.
    - birdyrooster 5y ago
      If you modified the tags a little, wouldn't that keep the song from matching checksum of another file?
      - rectang 5y ago
        Fooling the algorithm is not a robust solution. Infringement-detection algos get better hit rates all the time (fewer false negatives, although often at the price of more false positives) — consider all the work that has gone into detecting musical duplicates even when resampled, pitch/time-shifted, rerecorded, etc. The robust solution is to treat files which are redistributed and therefore trigger copyright provisions completely differently from files which are not redistributed. Furthermore, for the purposes of punitive action, sharing a copyrighted file with a limited whitelist of other users might reasonably be treated as a less of a screwup than making a file accessible to the entire internet. And therefore it should not be frictionless to share a file with the internet.
    - fps-hero 5y ago
      Honestly, the situation is far worse and nuanced than that. You can not determine whether content is infringing on copy write because of content alone. Copyright depends on context. Situation 1. You buy a PDF ebook. You have legal rights the person use of this file, but you upload it to your cloud storage and it gets flagged. You cannot determine if the intent of uploading the PDF was to facilitate pirating, or because you have a pirates copy, or because you have the rights to it. Situation 2. You hire a wedding photographer, and they supply you with photos that you do not own the right to distribute because they retain copyright. This is the same as the above situation, but personalised. Would you like your cloud provider to delete any file, including your wedding photo backups, because it with matches a hash in a database? Situation 3. Copyright fair use. Much has been written on the subject, but this is where copyright falls over in a digital age. Fair use is complete indistinguishable from piracy from a flagging files by content perspective.
  - cesarb 5y ago
    > Even simpler: do not upload copyrighted materials to Dropbox, Google Drive, etc. Everything is copyrighted. The comment you just wrote is automatically copyrighted. "Do not upload copyrighted materials" means you can only upload things made over a century ago (which either were made before copyright existed, or were copyrighted but their copyright expired). Want to upload your vacation photos? Too bad, they were made this year, so they are copyrighted, and will be copyrighted for several decades after you're already dead.
    - waffle_maniac 5y ago
      If our comments are copyrighted by us can HN legally refuse to remove them (like they often do)?
      - krallja 5y ago
        No, you have licensed your content to Y Combinator. It’s in the TOS: > By uploading any User Content you hereby grant and will grant Y Combinator and its affiliated companies a nonexclusive, worldwide, royalty free, fully paid up, transferable, sublicensable, perpetual, irrevocable license to copy, display, upload, perform, distribute, store, modify and otherwise use your User Content for any Y Combinator-related purpose in any form, medium or technology now known or later developed.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
  - Spooky23 5y ago
    All files are copyrighted. In fact, my .DS_Store files are generated by my computer against my content and belong to me. Some 10x engineer at google write code that flags it, how is that my problem?
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - cperciva 5y ago
      Not all files are copyrighted. For example, files which are not creative works -- including those which are mechanically created -- are not subject to copyright.
      - marcan_42 5y ago
        Yup, it's a common misconception that everything is copyrighted. Copyright requires creativity. An empty text file/image is not copyrightable, the pile of #include directives at the top of a C file is not copyrightable, etc. You need to create something that isn't just mechanical, regardless of whether the computer does it or you do it manually. At the point where creative decisions start to influence the process, that's where copyright comes into play.
        monocasa 5y ago
        > the pile of #include directives at the top of a C file is not copyrightable That used to be the thought, but Google v. Oracle ended with de mininimis defenses struck down, and imports still copyrightable, just Google was afforded a fair use defense to copying.
        maratc 5y ago
        As far as I remember the SCotUS verdict was "we don't want to say if it's copyrightable or not, but if it were copyritable it would fall under fair use".
  - gaius_baltar 5y ago
    > Even simpler: do not upload copyrighted materials to Dropbox, Google Drive, etc. Do not store a single "1" in a file, too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30060405 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30060405
hericium 5y ago
> Pretty sure the problem is some users have Google Drive's with GBs/TBs of pirated movies, etc, that are shared massively. That's Google's doing and problem. It doesn't justify creeping around all users' files.
prepend 5y ago
How is this a problem though? So what if I pirated movies in my cloud storage? Should my HDD manufactures also scan for pirated movies? Should samsonite suitcases check for pirated physical dvds? Should my smarttv check for pirated movies? Google isn’t even responsible legally, they are choosing to do this.
- monkeybutton 5y ago
  If copyright holders had their way, smart TVs would definitely block playing pirated media. To add to your list, why should HDMI care about encryption and stopping piracy?
- mijoharas 5y ago
  From the comment that you are replying to: > That are shared massively If the drive is shared, then google is shipping the bits to whoever it is shared with, same as YouTube.
blendergeek 5y ago
Google is not liable for this use of Google Drive in any way. Under 17 U.S.C. §§ 512 (also known as the Safe Harbor provision) Google is not liable for what users of the service upload and share as long as Google complies with take-down requests from rights holders. This behavior from Google goes way beyond what is legally required. Under the laws, Google could also scan the content for "potentially libelous" material but this also would not be legally required. Google has no legal responsibility to scan your content for possibly infringing material.
- rndgermandude 5y ago
  I would think that all these "copyright" scans Google performs are not performed against a list of known-infringing files that Google researchers compiled themselves by monitoring pirate websites. Instead the known-infringing list would be compiled from previous takedown requests. And one of these takedown requests either explicitly or implicitly (e.g. by listing a "folder") contained a .DS_Store file that looked like many other .DS_Store files because the user had not modified the folder (display) attributes on their mac, which was then added to the known-infringing list, and which then created this mess. But it's valid to question whether Google has to scan all files for known-infringing files in the first place. That's really where it gets tricky, legally. On the surface, they absolutely do NOT have to perform such scans under the DMCA. But then there are provisions in 17 US § 512 (aka the DMCA law) that state for example: "A service provider shall not be liable [...], if the service provider (i) does not have actual knowledge that the material or an activity using the material on the system or network is infringing; (ii) in the absence of such actual knowledge, is not aware of facts or circumstances from which infringing activity is apparent; or (iii) upon obtaining such knowledge or awareness, acts expeditiously to remove, or disable access to, the material;" This is very vague. It wouldn't be hard to imagine that some lawyers could show up claiming that because Google received a valid takedown notification for a specific file known to be a "pirate" release of some movie, that Google should have known or at least "been aware of facts or circumstances" that all copies of the same file in whatever user accounts are infringing (which might not be the case thanks to fair use, but lawyers and most juries would not care). If they could furthermore demonstrate that Google does already have knowledge required to locate each and every copy of a file in Google Drive accounts easily (e.g. find out through discovery that Google Drive "deduplicates" storage), then it would be game over with most juries and Google's safe harbor in the case gets denied and they are found liable. And that's only the US (DMCA) aspect of it. The German Bundesgerichtshof (Federal Court of Justice, highest court of ordinary justice) for example has found in the past[0] that service providers can be liable if they have been previously informed about copyright infringement and did not take "reasonable" steps to prevent further infringement, and that these "reasonable" steps may specifically include checking new uploads and existing files against a list of known-infringing files (or hashes thereof). Yeah, it sucks that Google and other service providers scan files that way, even if these files are never shared, and it sucks even more when somebody makes a mistake and puts a benign files on the known-infringing list (which is something Google should then correct, apologize for and reset any account flag/reinstate any banned accounts that got in the crossfire due to Google's mistake), but I can also appreciate that law makers and courts around the world have put Google into a situation where Google defacto (if not dejure) has to perform such scans to avoid liability. [0] In a case involving where Atari sued then-filehoster rapidshare over "Alone in the Dark", in 2012.
jfoster 5y ago
Google built the product without fully considering that problem, and now regular users are paying the price. In any case, it shouldn't be difficult for the product to make a distinction between files openly available and files being used privately within the drive on accounts that should look very legitimate to Google. The copyright filter would make a bit more sense on openly accessible files. Even then, why is Google going so far beyond what's legally required of them?

rectang 5y ago

This seems like a fundamental design flaw for any cloud storage service which enables sharing. It would be a problem not only for Google, but for Dropbox, etc. There needs to be a sharp distinction between files for your own use and files that are shared with the world — as in a global setting for whole volumes to disable global sharing and thus avert the need for copyright scanning. If by making files easy to share at any moment, the service creates a need to perform continuous copyright scanning of all drive content and then to take punitive action when it is detected, then the service is really nothing like a private hard drive. The potential for catastrophic loss, not only of the drive contents but of everything you access through Google services, is much more terrifying than the possibility of corrupting a local drive and much harder to plan for.

gerikson 5y ago
>Dropbox has adopted a policy of terminating the accounts of users who repeatedly infringe copyright or whose accounts are subject to multiple infringement allegations. If you repeatedly share files that infringe others’ copyrights, your account will be terminate https://help.dropbox.com/accounts-billing/security/copyright-policy https://help.dropbox.com/accounts-billing/security/copyright... > There needs to be a sharp distinction between files for your own use and files that are shared with the world Even simpler: do not upload copyrighted materials to Dropbox, Google Drive, etc. Use a local backup if needed, use sneakernet to transfer files.
- polski-g 5y ago
  What if you are authorized to have said copyrighted works?
- chordalkeyboard 5y ago
  > Even simpler: do not upload copyrighted materials to Dropbox, Google Drive, etc. it is absurd for copyright to prevent a legitimate user from storing media on a cloud filesystem.
- djsweet 5y ago
  > Even simpler: do not upload copyrighted materials to Dropbox, Google Drive, etc. As the article illustrates, it’s not actually that simple. Cloud services that terminate accounts (and probably instantly delete everything, to comply with GDPR, CCPA, etc.) for perceived copyright infringements will always and necessarily suffer from a false positive rate. We’ll likely never truly learn what this false positive rate is, but that it will always exist is reason enough to give pause to the thought that services should “just terminate their account” if they think it’s infringing on intellectual property laws. The only good answer here is an unqualified “Use a local backup”. The terms of use for non-business cloud storage absolve the providers of all responsibility for data loss, even when they have incorrectly taken punitive action against you.
- rectang 5y ago
  > Even simpler: do not upload copyrighted materials to Dropbox, Google Drive, etc. This is more difficult than you are making it sound. Considering the way most people use their computers, the only way to avoid copyright infringement entirely in your use of cloud storage is not to use cloud storage the way you use your local drive but instead to assess every last file that you upload as if you were publishing it on a public website. Sure, you can avoid uploading pirated movies (perhaps by never downloading any of them in the first place). But in fact, original works are typically copyrighted by default as soon as they are created, even if the copyright is not formally registered — and we depend on a patchwork quilt of implicit and explicit licenses for viewing and use of files on the internet. Have you ever saved a quote from somewhere? That was probably copyrighted; your use is probably legitimate, but a naive algorithm might not think so.
  - birdyrooster 5y ago
    If you modified the tags a little, wouldn't that keep the song from matching checksum of another file?
    - rectang 5y ago
      Fooling the algorithm is not a robust solution. Infringement-detection algos get better hit rates all the time (fewer false negatives, although often at the price of more false positives) — consider all the work that has gone into detecting musical duplicates even when resampled, pitch/time-shifted, rerecorded, etc. The robust solution is to treat files which are redistributed and therefore trigger copyright provisions completely differently from files which are not redistributed. Furthermore, for the purposes of punitive action, sharing a copyrighted file with a limited whitelist of other users might reasonably be treated as a less of a screwup than making a file accessible to the entire internet. And therefore it should not be frictionless to share a file with the internet.
  - fps-hero 5y ago
    Honestly, the situation is far worse and nuanced than that. You can not determine whether content is infringing on copy write because of content alone. Copyright depends on context. Situation 1. You buy a PDF ebook. You have legal rights the person use of this file, but you upload it to your cloud storage and it gets flagged. You cannot determine if the intent of uploading the PDF was to facilitate pirating, or because you have a pirates copy, or because you have the rights to it. Situation 2. You hire a wedding photographer, and they supply you with photos that you do not own the right to distribute because they retain copyright. This is the same as the above situation, but personalised. Would you like your cloud provider to delete any file, including your wedding photo backups, because it with matches a hash in a database? Situation 3. Copyright fair use. Much has been written on the subject, but this is where copyright falls over in a digital age. Fair use is complete indistinguishable from piracy from a flagging files by content perspective.
- cesarb 5y ago
  > Even simpler: do not upload copyrighted materials to Dropbox, Google Drive, etc. Everything is copyrighted. The comment you just wrote is automatically copyrighted. "Do not upload copyrighted materials" means you can only upload things made over a century ago (which either were made before copyright existed, or were copyrighted but their copyright expired). Want to upload your vacation photos? Too bad, they were made this year, so they are copyrighted, and will be copyrighted for several decades after you're already dead.
  - waffle_maniac 5y ago
    If our comments are copyrighted by us can HN legally refuse to remove them (like they often do)?
    - krallja 5y ago
      No, you have licensed your content to Y Combinator. It’s in the TOS: > By uploading any User Content you hereby grant and will grant Y Combinator and its affiliated companies a nonexclusive, worldwide, royalty free, fully paid up, transferable, sublicensable, perpetual, irrevocable license to copy, display, upload, perform, distribute, store, modify and otherwise use your User Content for any Y Combinator-related purpose in any form, medium or technology now known or later developed.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- Spooky23 5y ago
  All files are copyrighted. In fact, my .DS_Store files are generated by my computer against my content and belong to me. Some 10x engineer at google write code that flags it, how is that my problem?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - cperciva 5y ago
    Not all files are copyrighted. For example, files which are not creative works -- including those which are mechanically created -- are not subject to copyright.
    - marcan_42 5y ago
      Yup, it's a common misconception that everything is copyrighted. Copyright requires creativity. An empty text file/image is not copyrightable, the pile of #include directives at the top of a C file is not copyrightable, etc. You need to create something that isn't just mechanical, regardless of whether the computer does it or you do it manually. At the point where creative decisions start to influence the process, that's where copyright comes into play.
      - monocasa 5y ago
        > the pile of #include directives at the top of a C file is not copyrightable That used to be the thought, but Google v. Oracle ended with de mininimis defenses struck down, and imports still copyrightable, just Google was afforded a fair use defense to copying.
        maratc 5y ago
        As far as I remember the SCotUS verdict was "we don't want to say if it's copyrightable or not, but if it were copyritable it would fall under fair use".
- gaius_baltar 5y ago
  > Even simpler: do not upload copyrighted materials to Dropbox, Google Drive, etc. Do not store a single "1" in a file, too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30060405 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30060405

hericium 5y ago

> Pretty sure the problem is some users have Google Drive's with GBs/TBs of pirated movies, etc, that are shared massively. That's Google's doing and problem. It doesn't justify creeping around all users' files.

prepend 5y ago

How is this a problem though? So what if I pirated movies in my cloud storage? Should my HDD manufactures also scan for pirated movies? Should samsonite suitcases check for pirated physical dvds? Should my smarttv check for pirated movies? Google isn’t even responsible legally, they are choosing to do this.

monkeybutton 5y ago
If copyright holders had their way, smart TVs would definitely block playing pirated media. To add to your list, why should HDMI care about encryption and stopping piracy?
mijoharas 5y ago
From the comment that you are replying to: > That are shared massively If the drive is shared, then google is shipping the bits to whoever it is shared with, same as YouTube.

blendergeek 5y ago

Google is not liable for this use of Google Drive in any way. Under 17 U.S.C. §§ 512 (also known as the Safe Harbor provision) Google is not liable for what users of the service upload and share as long as Google complies with take-down requests from rights holders. This behavior from Google goes way beyond what is legally required. Under the laws, Google could also scan the content for "potentially libelous" material but this also would not be legally required. Google has no legal responsibility to scan your content for possibly infringing material.

rndgermandude 5y ago
I would think that all these "copyright" scans Google performs are not performed against a list of known-infringing files that Google researchers compiled themselves by monitoring pirate websites. Instead the known-infringing list would be compiled from previous takedown requests. And one of these takedown requests either explicitly or implicitly (e.g. by listing a "folder") contained a .DS_Store file that looked like many other .DS_Store files because the user had not modified the folder (display) attributes on their mac, which was then added to the known-infringing list, and which then created this mess. But it's valid to question whether Google has to scan all files for known-infringing files in the first place. That's really where it gets tricky, legally. On the surface, they absolutely do NOT have to perform such scans under the DMCA. But then there are provisions in 17 US § 512 (aka the DMCA law) that state for example: "A service provider shall not be liable [...], if the service provider (i) does not have actual knowledge that the material or an activity using the material on the system or network is infringing; (ii) in the absence of such actual knowledge, is not aware of facts or circumstances from which infringing activity is apparent; or (iii) upon obtaining such knowledge or awareness, acts expeditiously to remove, or disable access to, the material;" This is very vague. It wouldn't be hard to imagine that some lawyers could show up claiming that because Google received a valid takedown notification for a specific file known to be a "pirate" release of some movie, that Google should have known or at least "been aware of facts or circumstances" that all copies of the same file in whatever user accounts are infringing (which might not be the case thanks to fair use, but lawyers and most juries would not care). If they could furthermore demonstrate that Google does already have knowledge required to locate each and every copy of a file in Google Drive accounts easily (e.g. find out through discovery that Google Drive "deduplicates" storage), then it would be game over with most juries and Google's safe harbor in the case gets denied and they are found liable. And that's only the US (DMCA) aspect of it. The German Bundesgerichtshof (Federal Court of Justice, highest court of ordinary justice) for example has found in the past[0] that service providers can be liable if they have been previously informed about copyright infringement and did not take "reasonable" steps to prevent further infringement, and that these "reasonable" steps may specifically include checking new uploads and existing files against a list of known-infringing files (or hashes thereof). Yeah, it sucks that Google and other service providers scan files that way, even if these files are never shared, and it sucks even more when somebody makes a mistake and puts a benign files on the known-infringing list (which is something Google should then correct, apologize for and reset any account flag/reinstate any banned accounts that got in the crossfire due to Google's mistake), but I can also appreciate that law makers and courts around the world have put Google into a situation where Google defacto (if not dejure) has to perform such scans to avoid liability. [0] In a case involving where Atari sued then-filehoster rapidshare over "Alone in the Dark", in 2012.

jfoster 5y ago

Google built the product without fully considering that problem, and now regular users are paying the price. In any case, it shouldn't be difficult for the product to make a distinction between files openly available and files being used privately within the drive on accounts that should look very legitimate to Google. The copyright filter would make a bit more sense on openly accessible files. Even then, why is Google going so far beyond what's legally required of them?