[ianbooker]

The early version of Google Play Music asked for your MP3s, so you could have them in the cloud for streaming. I guess they did this for a baseline of data and music and now I wonder if this was an elaborate hack to circumvent legal implications. Should have read the terms back then.

That would be an interesting story!

[the-rc]

Uh, no, uploaded MP3s couldn't even be deduplicated across different users, because of lawyers. I know because I was there. The team had to ensure having maaaany petabytes of storage on launch day. Maybe the label or whoever owns the rights to the track today uploaded whatever they could find online? One way to verify that is checking if the same issue occurs on Spotify or Apple Music.

[tomrod]

Nice! Love to hear the war stories.

Do you have insight into what may have allowed some of the anecdotes others are describing, of bootleg versions being the versions used by Google Music/Youtube Music?

[the-rc]

I don't know. Weirder things have happened:

https://www.reddit.com/r/PiratedGames/comments/172b5kv/rocks...

[martinsnow]

Filsystem level deduplication is always legal

[the-rc]

Is that what the counsel said?