[nextlevelwizard]

While this is clearly abusing intent behind the "unlimited" sales pitch, I still do not think it's in violation of it. There's also most likely more than just this guy owning copy of the files from SoundCloud, so once Google has copy of them all they can just cache it for the rest of the people. I.e. you don't need unique files for every user who has some file, instead you can just give out the one to anyone who requests it.

[milankragujevic]

Yeah, except people on DataHoarder encrypt their files so that the providers can't store one copy per unique file but have to store one copy per one file in any user's account.

[cs2818]

I always encrypt because I worry an automated copyright scan will be the end of my account. If there was a policy that assured my non-shared files wouldn't be subject to these scans I would happily store content unencrypted.

For reference, I don't store pirated content, rather content that I have a license for, but cloud providers have no way of knowing that. Unfortunately the dispute processes are unreliable, so when it's time to backup a media project, I play it safe and encrypt.

[0xcde4c3db]

> For reference, I don't store pirated content, rather content that I have a license for, but cloud providers have no way of knowing that.

I'm pretty sure that they just assert that the backup is illegal even if it came from a licensed copy. One argument (used by Nintendo IIRC) is that the official media/servers are too reliable to require backups, and thus anything purporting to be a backup is really for another purpose and thereby not exempt under the statutes authorizing backups.

[cuckcuckspruce]

That's pretty uncaring on Nintendo's part. I wonder how many original Nintendo Entertainment System cartridges are destroyed in natural disasters without backup whose owners can only now play ROM dumps of them from the Internet.

My entire Nintendo DS and 3DS cart collection was stolen in a break-in at my place. You can bet that instead of repurchasing I simply bought a flash cart.

[cyphar]

You often see that cloud services or streaming services are creating policies and DRM around copyright laws that actually remove freedoms given to you under copyright (fair use for example, or even instances where you have licensed copies).

I wouldn't trust such services to respect your rights in any capacity. In fact, I would argue that the "our incredible journey" trend is a form of property damage (a storage rental place can't just burn their store to the ground with customer's posessions still inside).

[Veratyr]

IANAL but Google's ToS for copyright seem to be pretty safe so long as you don't share links to copyrighted content https://support.google.com/docs/answer/148505

> Respect copyright laws. Do not share copyrighted content without authorization or provide links to sites where your readers can obtain unauthorized downloads of copyrighted content. It is our policy to respond to clear notices of alleged copyright infringement. Repeated infringement of intellectual property rights, including copyright, will result in account termination. If you see a violation of Google's copyright policies, report copyright infringement.

Given that they cater to businesses, I don't think they could do automated scans.

[drampelt]

Looks like they do hash matching to automatically scan for copyrighted content: https://torrentfreak.com/google-drive-uses-hash-matching-det...

[Veratyr]

But they also only did anything with it when the user tried to share it.

[nextlevelwizard]

Definitely not all. For example the top post of all time (where the guy has 1 Petabyte of videos in Amazon drive) he talks about how only his personal files are encrypted. Then again his videos are recordings of camsites so they might be quite unique

[giancarlostoro]

Is there a valid reason for this aside from making sure if they delete it once, they don't delete it everywhere? Now I see the true issue against datahoarders... Wasting more space than needed to account for a situation that their own actions kinda put them under...

[apetresc]

I'll go ahead and state the obvious – it's because the vast majority of the files /r/Datahoarders is hoarding is illegal material that they don't want to get ToS'ed for.

[rangibaby]

Whyyy?

[johnchristopher]

Oooooooh... reminds me of something https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2438181 [How Dropbox sacrifices user privacy for cost savings (dubfire.net)]