Pirates Are Uploading Movies To Google Drive, Because Torrents Are Dying?
It’s not altogether surprising that pirates are trying new and more creative ways to spread copyrighted materials on the internet. For instance, using cloud storage services like Google Drive to upload pirated movies and TV shows.
Probably, this could be a counter measure against the actions taken by copyright holders and law enforcement agencies. Remember how the most popular torrent site KickAss was wiped out of its existence, although, later it was brought back by its original staffers in a small form. And as illegal torrent crack down continues, for pirates, it’s getting hard to promote their content through the BitTorrent network.
According to a report by Gadgets360, around 5,000 DMCA takedown requests, for illegal media hosted on Google Drive, have been sent by various copyright holders and Hollywood studios to Google in the last month.
Pirates upload a complete downloadable Movie or TV show file on the Drive and share its link. There can also be an empty link to the Drive with an embedded YouTube video of the media.
The videos are uploaded to YouTube as unlisted, which is done to exclude them from the Content ID filters. A similar technique was reported earlier this year, telling that massive amounts of pornographic content were uploaded to Google Servers via YouTube.
These videos are shared across various Facebook pages, online forums, subreddits, and even My Maps.
My Maps is a custom map builder tool developed by Google almost a decade ago. With no verification in place, pirates are using the service to put content links which can be accessed by other users.
Using My Maps, people can add a new location to the map, including pirate links, which can be shared elsewhere. This reduces the possibility of being pointed out by some piracy prevention tool.
Google Drive isn’t the only service that’s used a launch pad for piracy. Dropbox, OneDrive, and Kim Dotcom’s Mega are also in line. However, the higher storage limit, wider reach, and ease of access put Google Drive ahead of its competitors, even when people are using it to pirate movies and tv shows., etc.
The number of DMCA requests related to Google Drive was relatively high in the comparison to others. Also, it’s not only YouTube but video sharing sites like DailyMotion and Video which are abused by the pirate community.
However, it isn’t the fact that Google has turned deaf ears towards this issue. Earlier this year, the company introduced a detection technique called hash matching to find infringed content uploaded to Drive. But it appears, things aren’t working as intended.
Google said in a statement that DMCA requests are taken very seriously by the company and quick action is taken after the rightsholders tell them about any copyrighted material posted online.
