>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
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.
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.
it is absurd for copyright to prevent a legitimate user from storing media on a cloud filesystem.
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.
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.
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.
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.
IMO, that's precisely what you should be doing.
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.
> 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.
Some 10x engineer at google write code that flags it, how is that my problem?
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.
There is certainly creativity in API design, it's just that the right to interoperability and the utilitarian aspect should trump any copyright claim on the API itself. But there is no creativity in writing imports; you aren't making any material decisions, you're just doing something the compiler requires you to do.
But as someone who's a big fan of your work, I'd implore you to not trust myself or your knowledge on this and hit up a lawyer. You're close enough to the edge of legality with a lot of your work that I'd hate to see you stifled by a minor misunderstanding here that could have been avoided. Google v. Oracle ended better than it could have, but AFAICT still heavily complicated RE work and independent implementations. It made a lot of this murkier, and being at least internally consistent with a legal theory here could make a bad situation at least a little better by leaving you with more options.
I do not retain a lawyer personally, but I inform myself of legal opinions around this field. It's why I felt comfortable enough to write this:
https://asahilinux.org/copyright/
Ultimately though, once you stay clear of obviously problematic actions, the question of whether you're going to get in trouble boils down to whether the company you're up against is evil, for better or for worse. Given that Apple isn't going around suing jailbreakers and Hackintoshers, I'm not too worried that they'll go after us as long as we don't do anything stupid.
Conversely, I got frivolously sued by Sony for talking about a security vulnerability in the PS3... and yeah, I had to get a lawyer for that one.
In the end, once you get yourself deep enough into legal analysis around these subjects, you come to the conclusion that everyone violates copyright in little ways, all the time, and the world would grind to a halt if we stopped. The system is broken and relies on the goodwill of the people participating to not completely collapse. For example, I've previously mentioned how copying most example code you find online, e.g. in places like Stack Overflow, is a copyright violation unless you adhere strictly to the license (did you know SO content is licensed under CC-BY-SA?). Posting third party code snippets to most services, e.g. Twitter, is a copyright violation due to incompatibility between the license and the ToS requirements of the site. And so on.
Do not store a single "1" in a file, too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30060405
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.
> That are shared massively
If the drive is shared, then google is shipping the bits to whoever it is shared with, same as YouTube.
That's Google's doing and problem. It doesn't justify creeping around all users' files.
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.
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.
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?