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Comment by harshreality | Hacker News Reader

This (the copyright scanning policy) isn't new, is it?

What it's scanning for in this case is material it believes to be copyrighted, and restricts features (notably sharing) for content that matches.

Given that copyright law exists, and that Google doesn't like wasting engineering time on legal stuff unless refusing to do it would result in lawsuits, this scanning policy is a fairly low-impact solution that has probably been deemed legally necessary to avoid media company lawsuits. I don't like it, but the alternative is for Google (and Microsoft, and any other cloud storage that allows sharing) to mount an expensive legal effort to try to overturn decades of digital copyright precedent, which is likely to fail.

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> What it's scanning for is material it believes to be copyrighted,

All "material" created by any human is copyrighted, and has been for decades. The question is who owns what rights, which Google can't know.

> decades of digital copyright precedent

What precedent?

Precedent: If you're hosting it you're guilty.

Or more tactfully, if you're hosting it, we'll assume you're guilty because we don't want to deal with it, and you agreed to a very restrictive ToS that lets us take it down.

Google cannot know if you have the rights for any possible document. If you have a whole book it could be bought from Amazon or downloaded via Torrent.

There can even be the case where you have private conteacts that give you rights that Google cannot know.

I can inly thing that they will look for the low hanging fruit: a folder full of movies, music, and other content.

Not really, otherwise services that host user-generated content, like youtube, wouldn't exist.

What a hosting service needs to provide is a way for the user to flag content + provide an "acceptable" response time.

Another approach, a more proactive approach, is for the content owners to share the digital "finger print" of the IP (movies, music, etc.) with the hosting service, so that the hosting service can scan uploaded files and compare them.

> been deemed legally necessary

Ah, the old "deeming things" trick [0].

Almost everything is copyrighted. Like most of us here I've given original writing, code or music to people who've shared it on Google drive. That material is copyrighted no more or less than anything by Disney or Sony.

Google doesn't just "scan for copyright violations", it specifically acts out of fear or leverage to be an unpaid policeman for special interests, rich and powerful media companies.

I haven't said anything new here, but I do think it's important that we see arguments built on false standards. Google isn't championing the law or anything noble and we would do well to be very precise about choosing words to describe what is happening.

[0] deem: acting by fiat and art without necessary recourse to logic, law, evidence or consistency

The existence of copyright law is to blame. Not Google, who's just trying to adhere to law.

Why not both?

Good point.

It's only after you share a file that the copyright scan is triggered

Proton Drive has entered the chat.

Encrypt everything and you, as the company offering services, no longer need to worry about whats being shared because you cant see it.

Better yet, just don’t use managed services like GDrive

If you need to, there are alternatives like proton or mega, or a 100 other services Im sure

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