5 ms·

If he uses it for work, and clearly, most shared links he creates are of copyrighted media content, how would this work in practice? Does Google Drive/Dropbox h

by hs86 4y ago

If he uses it for work, and clearly, most shared links he creates are of copyrighted media content, how would this work in practice? Does Google Drive/Dropbox have some flag for "creator" accounts?

LinuxBender 4y ago
I don't have an answer for your question but from experience I can say that anecdotally most well known creators have their own infrastructure or outsourced infrastructure and legal teams. Content will not be deleted unless there are repeated egregious violations and complete refusal to remediate violations of the contract that their legal team agreed to. By contact I do not mean some thing that someone clickity-clicked their way through. I mean a contract that went back and forth between legal teams and signed/recorded by a public notary. In such cases deletions would always be done by a human. I have no idea why the Rick and Morty creators did not have such an agreement in place with Dropbox to prevent this scenario or if Dropbox even supports this model. As a funny side story, at least I think it is funny... I used to manage the backend servers for Atari. The "Internet Police" used bots to send take down notices for copyright violations and emailed us saying to take down Atari's software because it was a copyright violation. Atari was our customer. This should have been obvious as the FCrDNS had their domain name in the PTR records. I found it hilarious but also saw how that was a bit of foreshadowing as to how the internet would devolve.
- smolder 4y ago
  Rick and Morty isn't the only thing Justin works on. Likely this was his personal account and not something used specifically for that show. There's no mention of the show in his tweet.
thrdbndndn 4y ago
Obviously they said so in TOS, but it's pretty rare to get terminated due to copyrighted material alone. At least not until you mass-share (maybe the case here?) them.
xnorswap 4y ago
Copyright is automatic, most things that most people create are copyrighted media content. The problem is that we've ended up with a situation where copyright is automatically: 1. Assumed to be owned by media-corporations 2. Assumed to be wilfully violated by users 3. Assumed to be that deletion is the correct resolution 4. Assumed the USA to be the jurisdiction of the copyright holder and user All of these assumptions should be challenged. This isn't a technical challenge, it's a legal one. Special treatment for VIPs isn't the answer.
kmeisthax 4y ago
Assuming this is copyright related... probably not. The only way this could be done in practice would be for Justin Roiland/Williams Street/Rick & Morty LLC/Cartoon Network/Warner Bros. to legally indemnify Dropbox - as in, agree to pay all of Dropbox's legal fees and damages if they get sued for copyright infringement outside of their DMCA 512 safe harbor. This is entirely impractical for an individual to pull off, and Dropbox might not even have a copyright indemnity policy for corporate clients. Also, if anyone actually has a bone to pick with Dropbox over shared links, this is probably a very bad idea, because it would just be opening WB's far larger pockets to whoever Justin is pirating content from. There is no actual legal provision for "creators" to get away with copyright infringement that we cannot. And let me be perfectly clear: It is not legal to copy media over any kind of file share, even privately within an organization, unless you have a copyright license, which they clearly don't. Censorship[0] on-demand in exchange for liability limitation is the world that all these media companies chose to live in. They screamed their heads off about the harms of noncommercial piracy over the Internet while also, apparently, pirating enough content internally that Dropbox needed to shut off their account. If they want their account back, then either pay for a license to every video file on that share or publicly lobby Congress to legalize file sharing. Or this could have nothing to do with copyright and some internal spam filter just shat the bed very badly. The original linked tweet didn't clarify anything and Justin might just not even have anything to clarify with. I really hate how modern tech companies are allowed to do summary executions of accounts like this with no explanation. [0] I am willing to accept the "copyright infringement is not speech" argument, which SCOTUS also does, but DMCA 512 still allows censorship of novel speech because the counternotice procedure is laughably inadequate.
- towaway15463 4y ago
  bet you a dollar that they were taken down because they were sharing links to content they had created for Rick and Morty etc and Dropbox’s dumb algo just didn’t know that they were the creators of that content.
  - heretogetout 4y ago
    If that's the case surely they could have told him that was the reason. Otherwise we're talking about software engineers deliberately writing code to waste other people's time and make the Dropbox product look worse to their customers or prospective customers.

by hs86 4y ago

If he uses it for work, and clearly, most shared links he creates are of copyrighted media content, how would this work in practice? Does Google Drive/Dropbox have some flag for "creator" accounts?

LinuxBender 4y ago

I don't have an answer for your question but from experience I can say that anecdotally most well known creators have their own infrastructure or outsourced infrastructure and legal teams. Content will not be deleted unless there are repeated egregious violations and complete refusal to remediate violations of the contract that their legal team agreed to. By contact I do not mean some thing that someone clickity-clicked their way through. I mean a contract that went back and forth between legal teams and signed/recorded by a public notary. In such cases deletions would always be done by a human. I have no idea why the Rick and Morty creators did not have such an agreement in place with Dropbox to prevent this scenario or if Dropbox even supports this model. As a funny side story, at least I think it is funny... I used to manage the backend servers for Atari. The "Internet Police" used bots to send take down notices for copyright violations and emailed us saying to take down Atari's software because it was a copyright violation. Atari was our customer. This should have been obvious as the FCrDNS had their domain name in the PTR records. I found it hilarious but also saw how that was a bit of foreshadowing as to how the internet would devolve.

smolder 4y ago
Rick and Morty isn't the only thing Justin works on. Likely this was his personal account and not something used specifically for that show. There's no mention of the show in his tweet.

thrdbndndn 4y ago

Obviously they said so in TOS, but it's pretty rare to get terminated due to copyrighted material alone. At least not until you mass-share (maybe the case here?) them.

xnorswap 4y ago

Copyright is automatic, most things that most people create are copyrighted media content. The problem is that we've ended up with a situation where copyright is automatically: 1. Assumed to be owned by media-corporations 2. Assumed to be wilfully violated by users 3. Assumed to be that deletion is the correct resolution 4. Assumed the USA to be the jurisdiction of the copyright holder and user All of these assumptions should be challenged. This isn't a technical challenge, it's a legal one. Special treatment for VIPs isn't the answer.

kmeisthax 4y ago

Assuming this is copyright related... probably not. The only way this could be done in practice would be for Justin Roiland/Williams Street/Rick & Morty LLC/Cartoon Network/Warner Bros. to legally indemnify Dropbox - as in, agree to pay all of Dropbox's legal fees and damages if they get sued for copyright infringement outside of their DMCA 512 safe harbor. This is entirely impractical for an individual to pull off, and Dropbox might not even have a copyright indemnity policy for corporate clients. Also, if anyone actually has a bone to pick with Dropbox over shared links, this is probably a very bad idea, because it would just be opening WB's far larger pockets to whoever Justin is pirating content from. There is no actual legal provision for "creators" to get away with copyright infringement that we cannot. And let me be perfectly clear: It is not legal to copy media over any kind of file share, even privately within an organization, unless you have a copyright license, which they clearly don't. Censorship[0] on-demand in exchange for liability limitation is the world that all these media companies chose to live in. They screamed their heads off about the harms of noncommercial piracy over the Internet while also, apparently, pirating enough content internally that Dropbox needed to shut off their account. If they want their account back, then either pay for a license to every video file on that share or publicly lobby Congress to legalize file sharing. Or this could have nothing to do with copyright and some internal spam filter just shat the bed very badly. The original linked tweet didn't clarify anything and Justin might just not even have anything to clarify with. I really hate how modern tech companies are allowed to do summary executions of accounts like this with no explanation. [0] I am willing to accept the "copyright infringement is not speech" argument, which SCOTUS also does, but DMCA 512 still allows censorship of novel speech because the counternotice procedure is laughably inadequate.

towaway15463 4y ago
bet you a dollar that they were taken down because they were sharing links to content they had created for Rick and Morty etc and Dropbox’s dumb algo just didn’t know that they were the creators of that content.
- heretogetout 4y ago
  If that's the case surely they could have told him that was the reason. Otherwise we're talking about software engineers deliberately writing code to waste other people's time and make the Dropbox product look worse to their customers or prospective customers.