Amid Crackdown On Torrent Websites, Some Users Move To Google Drive To Distribute Movies and Shows (ndtv.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: As crackdown on torrent sites continues around the world, people who are pirating TV shows and movies are having to get a little more creative. Cloud storage services such as Google Drive, Dropbox, and Kim Dotcom's Mega are some of the popular ones that are being used to distribute copyrighted content, according to DMCA takedown requests reviewed by Gadgets 360. Google Drive seems most popular among such users, with nearly five thousand DMCA takedown requests filed by Hollywood studios and other copyright holders just last month. Each DMCA requests had listed a few hundred Google Drive links that the content owners wanted pulled. What's interesting though is that while at times pirates upload full movies to Google Drive or other cloud services, in other cases, these Google Drive links are empty and just have a YouTube video embedded.

Comments

Darknet torrenting, hellloooo?

[GameboyRMH]

This is the perfect opportunity to move to torrents over darknets such as I2P (but not Tor). This is also the end-state of piracy, unstoppable and untraceable file sharing. It's the last platform switch you'd have to make. The only downside is that it would force media companies to begin an assault on general-purpose computing.

Re:Darknet torrenting, hellloooo?

[Anonymous Coward]

The only downside is that it would force media companies to begin an assault on general-purpose computing.

They've already tried that and lost. The tech companies essentially strung them along and then ultimately ignored them. There's no way that any tech company is going to give up general purpose computing for the MFing entertainment industry, especially not while Donald Trump is in charge. Hollywood supported Hillary Clinton openly and everyone knows how much Donald Trump hates and punishes disloyalty. At least as long as Trump remains in office, Hollywood is screwed and they know it. Maybe that's one good thing to come out of the Trump administration.

Reports of it's death are greatly exaggerated

[boudie2]

They've been saying that bit torrent is on it's last legs since not long after I started to use it in about 2003. But yet it's still going. They apparently didn't know what they were talking about. Happens quite regularly on the internet. Once you see the humor of it, it's quite enjoyable.

Very risky progression by the *AA organizations

[Solandri]

You could be fairly certain movies shared via torrenting were pirated. You could be sure of the same to a lesser extent on YouTube. But movies shared via Google Drive - which is tied in with Google Photos, which automatically backs up all photos and videos shot by Android devices - are going to be predominantly home videos.

Say 0.1% of DMCA requests on YouTube are overreaching and block a home video because of something like a copyrighted song being heard playing in the background. If YouTube hosts a ratio of 10 home videos per pirated movie, then that means only 1 home video is improperly blocked (false positive) for every 100 pirated movies blocked (true positive). That ratio means the false positives are few and far between relative to the positive impact of the DMCA requests (getting pirated videos pulled).

But if they start applying those same algorithms to Google Drive, where there are probably 100,000 home videos per pirated movie, suddenly they'll be blocking 100 home videos for each single pirated movie blocked. The false positive rate relative to the true positive rate is now 10,000x higher. The annoyance factor will be that much higher, and they're risking raising the ire of the public, and getting the parts of the DMCA they bought and paid for rolled back by new legislation.