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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.
The Google drive video player looks just like the YouTube player, but if you analyze the traffic, it's clearly making requests to different servers than what YouTube uses.
Repeal the DMCA by any means necessary. Whole cloth.
Can you DMCA text?
Yes
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
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.
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.
Here are the most effective tools ever made to combat piracy: Steam, Netflix, Crunchyroll, Kickstarter, iTunes, etc etc.
Get my drift? This battle isn't gonna be won by crackdowns, and it will never be fully won at all. It can only be mitigated by very convenient, cheap, and fair legal systems for content sales and streaming.
Here's the thing: there's still an unlimited ammount of resources and tech available for pirates to use... the more you try clamping down on whatever tech is available, the more pirates will double down on alternatives.
There might've been a crackdown on torrent websites, but the category is pretty much alive and well without any signs of change. The so called crackdown didn't leave even a dent on the category as a whole.
It doesn't really matter if popular torrent websites gets taken down, a whole bunch more will pop up out of nowhere hosted in countries that don't care about nor listen to Hollywood demands.
And even if MPAA, RIAA, Hollywood studios and whatnot were able to suddently shut down each and every source of torrent files (will never happen), I'm willing to bet that it wouldn't take days before something new pops up. Torrents are not still used because it's the optimal strategy... it's just what people grew used to and I guess convenient to keep running. But if DMCA companies finally have their way and start really coming down too strongly on those, pirates will just... level up their game.
There files being found on Google Drive are probably not even the surface level of the whole thing... this is just people who don't know better putting files up in places that are easily found. I can't imagine any pirate who knows better putting files up in places known for having an open door policy for law enforcement.
An encrypted torrenting channel on the dark web. An unified encrypted system going through secure systems for file sharing. Secure messaging or e-mail systems being leveraged to share files.
Even for Google Drive and other cloud storage websites piracy could work and be left alone right there... it's quite simple: encrypt the files, fragment them and distribute in inconspicuous bits, build a player that consolidate and decrypt files before playing, and it's done.
This is pretty much what happened in early days of piracy... there were a multitude of file sharing systems, several of them created for legitimate purposes, appropriated by pirates to share copyrighted content.
If people analyze the trajectory that piracy went through the years, it's pretty incredible. File sharing websites, cloud storage services, primitive chat systems like IRC, the entire evolution of P2P file sharing, e-mail, FTP... every step of the way in matters of file sharing on the Internet had a pirate hand at some point.
And I have no doubt that somewhere someone must be developing a system that is fully encrypted, untraceable, and de-centralized... if something like that isn't already available. Because there will always be a fundamental need on the Internet for sharing files in a secure and private manner, and whatever form that takes, pirates will eventually be able to appropriate that.
But this is something known for lots of people since the early days of piracy... even before Napster I guess. The essencial problem with it is that piracy became normalized... as it can mostly be equated to just file sharing if you take the vilification out of the equation. There are entire countries that grew reliant on it for access to entertainment for a huge part of their population, and once it became normalized, where there's a will, there's a way.
You can't give enough powers to Hollywood and DMCA organizations to go after everyone because that'd be essencially giving them the keys to the entire Internet. And not only people will oppose that, governments and other businesses also will.
It doesn't matter on what side you are - for or against piracy, I mean. It's an unstoppable driving force, equalizer, phenomena, and culture overall.