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> 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 mo
by 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 agoIf you modified the tags a little, wouldn't that keep the song from matching checksum of another file?
- rectang 5y agoFooling 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 agoHonestly, 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.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago> to assess every last file that you upload as if you were publishing it on a public website. IMO, that's precisely what you should be doing.