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by drivebyacct2 5518 days ago
How can Google possibly know whether the files you upload were bought legally or not?
3 comments

I would think the music industry isn't past seeding P2P networks with watermarked files and then suing Google to get a court order to scan people's collections en masse.
They can't tell if your copy is legal or not, but if your copy of an album hashes to the same as the copy found via TPB, they'd consider it suspect.

I think there's enough variation in CD ripping software and various encoder profiles that different rips of the same album using different software is not bit-for-bit the same. That would also be trivially defeatable, so I'm not sure what it'd get Google to do that.

hashes, ID3 tags, and distribution patterns?