> When it’s restricted, you may see a flag next to the filename, you won’t be able to share it, and your file will no longer be publicly accessible
So it's probably a combination of things, including piracy. They're not forbidding people from storing or retrieving the files, just not allowing anyone to publicly host whatever they want on Google's servers. Seems reasonable.
Of course this point of view is silly - Google have done very well to make users the product. A win:win scenario for those which couldn't afford the pay-for equivalents, but their ceaseless ability to kill useful services proved that they were never benevolent, nor a charity.
The internet has grown up, and so has the ability to scan masses of data for liabilities - Google's change here is not controversial or unexpected, and realistically if people have a problem with the many problems with US copyright laws they need to pick up their pens, change who they vote for and vote with their wallet.
As for the implementation I think it's pretty fair - they aren't stopping the user from their 'backups', they're just preventing their hardware and bandwidth being used as a piracy BBS.
OTOH, I welcome this change. Instead of losing my access or getting a strike on my account, I'd rather have my file merely flagged and stopped being shared (not that I share a lot).
I think service providers should be more transparent about problems they see with the users' accounts, so users can take appropriate actions. Of course there can be other mechanisms to prevent abuse, or lawful intercept (which is another can of worms that I want to leave it at the top shelf for now).
So, I've read a Google blog without bad feelings for once. That's good.
Spammers ruin everything.
This seems to be more related to DMCA violations to be honest.
Anyways, my spam issue stopped around two months ago. After I complained to Google for those spammy tags with multiple examples forwarded and multiple cases opened, they seem to have solved the issue (or added me to some sort of mention exclude list lol)
They don't actually block the file though, and there were (and still are) ways around the rate limit. (Which presumably they knew about to some extent, given you now cannot make copies of said files.)
They could easily start taking action on obvious copyright violations using Drive, but it's unlikely they would want to, unless actually mandated to legally.
I'm not sure what they would do about massive encrypted collections that have been rcloned onto their servers though. Aside from "please stop breaking our de-duplication".
Is anyone surprised by that? Every file sharing tool will invariable be used to share pirated and worse material until the people behind that tool show a willingness to stop that behavior. It is practically a universal law of the internet.
If Google were genuinely interested in stopping the spam, they would create a way for recipients to establish which organizations could send files to them.
Whitelisting orgs would either be an opt-in or opt-out feature. If it’s opt-in, it won’t prevent 99.999% of spam because nobody will set it up. If it’s opt-out, it will break sharing for 99.999% of users.
These are never easy problems.
I would. And anyone who doesn't want the spam would. Right now we send "550 Too much spam" responses to docs and sharepoint emails. I'd be happy to, as an alternative, use an interface at Google or Microsoft that let me whitelist the organizations who can send files.