Storing media in cloud storage without copyright issues
June 9, 2022 9:59 AM Subscribe
Is there a way to safely store files with copyrighted material on cloud storage?
I have a great deal of legally acquired audiobooks, books, comics, and movies backed up on cloud storage, and recently became aware that Dropbox and Google Drive will allegedly scan for copyrighted materials and delete them, or your entire account, if they are located. Is this accurate?
Is there any way for them to discern that I have purchased or otherwise acquired these files legally?
I had also downloaded digital copies of works I own physical copies of, which I feel is morally sound but I assume would be at best a legal grey area. Should I not host these files on cloud storage? Would zipping these files achieve anything?
I have everything stored on physical media, but had been hoping to use cloud storage for convenience and peace of mind.
I have a great deal of legally acquired audiobooks, books, comics, and movies backed up on cloud storage, and recently became aware that Dropbox and Google Drive will allegedly scan for copyrighted materials and delete them, or your entire account, if they are located. Is this accurate?
Is there any way for them to discern that I have purchased or otherwise acquired these files legally?
I had also downloaded digital copies of works I own physical copies of, which I feel is morally sound but I assume would be at best a legal grey area. Should I not host these files on cloud storage? Would zipping these files achieve anything?
I have everything stored on physical media, but had been hoping to use cloud storage for convenience and peace of mind.
I don't use Google Drive for this kind of storage, because you can use Youtube Music and upload your full library of music/audio files. You could do this with Google Play Music as well. Once uploaded they become available for you to stream through the music service.
For backup purposes, you may want to also use some other consumer-level service, like Backblaze or something similar.
posted by Lafe at 10:05 AM on June 9, 2022
For backup purposes, you may want to also use some other consumer-level service, like Backblaze or something similar.
posted by Lafe at 10:05 AM on June 9, 2022
I have tons of legally acquired eBooks from a few different providers on my Google Drive. Never had an issue. What I know is that they'll look for the hash (a mathematical calculation that gives a unique output for any file) for known pirated versions of some content. So if your "grey market" versions have a unique hash that is known to only match with pirated versions and the publishers had lodged a complaint, that might get you in trouble.
posted by Candleman at 10:06 AM on June 9, 2022
posted by Candleman at 10:06 AM on June 9, 2022
Hypothetically you can use something like BoxCryptor to encrypto stuff with Dropbox.
posted by kschang at 10:06 AM on June 9, 2022
posted by kschang at 10:06 AM on June 9, 2022
You could also look at a zero-knowledge cloud service like SpiderOak ONE or Tresorit. With these, not even the SERVICE knows what you've uploaded there.
(Disclaimer: Longtime SpiderOak ONE customer. I have no other relationship with them.)
posted by humbug at 10:25 AM on June 9, 2022 [1 favorite]
(Disclaimer: Longtime SpiderOak ONE customer. I have no other relationship with them.)
posted by humbug at 10:25 AM on June 9, 2022 [1 favorite]
Encrypt it. Rclone is free.
posted by Geckwoistmeinauto at 10:42 AM on June 9, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by Geckwoistmeinauto at 10:42 AM on June 9, 2022 [1 favorite]
recently became aware that Dropbox and Google Drive will allegedly scan for copyrighted materials and delete them, or your entire account, if they are located. Is this accurate?
It's not at all very easy to know this without inside corporate knowledge, and that is not going to be available to us here, most likely. However, in the past conventional wisdom based on what has happened to most people is that Dropbox at least does not preemptively scan, and what you need to do if you want to put your account at risk is share material that matches stuff in their hash database, mainly by creating public sharing links. (Also, I can say anecdotally that at some point years ago I did trigger a copyright warning by creating and distributed to a few people a public sharing link for something, and Dropbox just blocked that link and sent me a nasty auto-generated email, they didn't even wipe the folders in question. But, policies change.)
After seeing this post, I googled around and found possibly the very same reddit threads that prompted it and not much else, and I have to say, I wasn't very confident in people's own narrative about what they did and whether they were or were not sharing, and also the potential scale of what they may have been sharing. So, while policies do change and Dropbox could conceivably start cracking down on this stuff preemptively, I'm not convinced this has really happened, especially not at large. In fact, they want your backup business, lots of people want to backup copyrighted stuff (and won't attempt to share it).
Is there a way to safely store files with copyrighted material on cloud storage?
Zero/no-knowledge encryption. (terminological caveat)
Also, for what it's worth, and I realize this is maybe relatively insane, I personally back up my dropbox folder to a zero knowledge backup service (specifically, SpiderOak One, already mentioned in this thread; in principle they have a cloud sync service that could replace it, but I find Dropbox a lot smoother for day-to-day stuff). This is as much to have multiple redundant backups as anything, less about the specific issue here.
posted by advil at 12:02 PM on June 9, 2022 [2 favorites]
It's not at all very easy to know this without inside corporate knowledge, and that is not going to be available to us here, most likely. However, in the past conventional wisdom based on what has happened to most people is that Dropbox at least does not preemptively scan, and what you need to do if you want to put your account at risk is share material that matches stuff in their hash database, mainly by creating public sharing links. (Also, I can say anecdotally that at some point years ago I did trigger a copyright warning by creating and distributed to a few people a public sharing link for something, and Dropbox just blocked that link and sent me a nasty auto-generated email, they didn't even wipe the folders in question. But, policies change.)
After seeing this post, I googled around and found possibly the very same reddit threads that prompted it and not much else, and I have to say, I wasn't very confident in people's own narrative about what they did and whether they were or were not sharing, and also the potential scale of what they may have been sharing. So, while policies do change and Dropbox could conceivably start cracking down on this stuff preemptively, I'm not convinced this has really happened, especially not at large. In fact, they want your backup business, lots of people want to backup copyrighted stuff (and won't attempt to share it).
Is there a way to safely store files with copyrighted material on cloud storage?
Zero/no-knowledge encryption. (terminological caveat)
Also, for what it's worth, and I realize this is maybe relatively insane, I personally back up my dropbox folder to a zero knowledge backup service (specifically, SpiderOak One, already mentioned in this thread; in principle they have a cloud sync service that could replace it, but I find Dropbox a lot smoother for day-to-day stuff). This is as much to have multiple redundant backups as anything, less about the specific issue here.
posted by advil at 12:02 PM on June 9, 2022 [2 favorites]
Is this accurate?
Whether it is or it isn't, the fact that it's even a question is exactly why I keep telling people that your digital information doesn't really exist until you can put your hands on at least two copies residing on separate physical media that you own and preferably stored at least 10km apart.
As soon as you're relying solely on somebody else's computer to back up your stuff, you're handing them the ability to destroy it for you - either accidentally, or by policy, or by policy change.
So just keep using whatever cloud service is currently working for you and don't bother trying to work around possible or rumoured or even non-current but future-plausible content scanning and deletion policy until it actually bites you - by which time you should have in hand everything you need in order for that bite to prompt no response stronger than "huh, that's annoying" and the uploading of another complete copy of one of your own local backups to a less irritating provider.
That said: if the amount of stuff you need to make available to yourself online is relatively modest, Keybase accounts come with up to 250GB of encrypted online storage that nobody but the account holder can see inside, at no charge. In particular, the only thing Keybase's servers know about what's stored in your account is how much of it there is in total. How your stuff is arranged into files and folders and what any of those are called and what's in them is knowable only to the open-source Keybase client software that runs on your own devices, by means of private decryption keys stored only on those devices.
posted by flabdablet at 12:29 PM on June 9, 2022 [2 favorites]
Whether it is or it isn't, the fact that it's even a question is exactly why I keep telling people that your digital information doesn't really exist until you can put your hands on at least two copies residing on separate physical media that you own and preferably stored at least 10km apart.
As soon as you're relying solely on somebody else's computer to back up your stuff, you're handing them the ability to destroy it for you - either accidentally, or by policy, or by policy change.
So just keep using whatever cloud service is currently working for you and don't bother trying to work around possible or rumoured or even non-current but future-plausible content scanning and deletion policy until it actually bites you - by which time you should have in hand everything you need in order for that bite to prompt no response stronger than "huh, that's annoying" and the uploading of another complete copy of one of your own local backups to a less irritating provider.
That said: if the amount of stuff you need to make available to yourself online is relatively modest, Keybase accounts come with up to 250GB of encrypted online storage that nobody but the account holder can see inside, at no charge. In particular, the only thing Keybase's servers know about what's stored in your account is how much of it there is in total. How your stuff is arranged into files and folders and what any of those are called and what's in them is knowable only to the open-source Keybase client software that runs on your own devices, by means of private decryption keys stored only on those devices.
posted by flabdablet at 12:29 PM on June 9, 2022 [2 favorites]
I have about 500 albums of MP3s on Nextcloud and have never had a problem. Nextcloud comes with an audio player, so you can stream your music. I had that same music on Dropbox until recently, again without any problems.
posted by COD at 2:40 PM on June 9, 2022
posted by COD at 2:40 PM on June 9, 2022
COD, I'd always understood that what Nextcloud offers is a software suite for convenient access to online storage; I didn't think it was an online storage provider in its own right. Has that changed? Where does your Nextcloud instance actually keep those 500 albums?
posted by flabdablet at 6:59 AM on June 10, 2022
posted by flabdablet at 6:59 AM on June 10, 2022
@flabdablet - The datacenter is in Germany - cubeatic.com is the provider. I'm paying about $3/mo for a 500 GB account, with them taking care of keeping Nextcloud updated. I'm also getting all the other Nextcloud servives, calendar, todo, notes, RSS reader, file storage, photo sharing, etc.
posted by COD at 7:52 AM on June 12, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by COD at 7:52 AM on June 12, 2022 [1 favorite]
Cubeatic looks like very good value!
I just signed up for one of their free accounts which gives me 10GB to play with, over four times the capacity of my current Dropbox freebie, and apparently without the irritating client count limit as well.
I've also just installed the nextcloud-desktop package on my Debian laptop and the Nextcloud app on my Android phone, and if they work at least as well as Dropbox's proprietary stuff always has then Dropbox might well get the flick. But that's not necessarily a given: I've just managed to corrupt a test copy of my KeePass database after using Nextcloud to sync it between laptop and phone, and until I track down a definitive cause for that I'll be treating my new account with some caution.
Thanks, COD.
posted by flabdablet at 5:24 PM on June 12, 2022 [1 favorite]
I just signed up for one of their free accounts which gives me 10GB to play with, over four times the capacity of my current Dropbox freebie, and apparently without the irritating client count limit as well.
I've also just installed the nextcloud-desktop package on my Debian laptop and the Nextcloud app on my Android phone, and if they work at least as well as Dropbox's proprietary stuff always has then Dropbox might well get the flick. But that's not necessarily a given: I've just managed to corrupt a test copy of my KeePass database after using Nextcloud to sync it between laptop and phone, and until I track down a definitive cause for that I'll be treating my new account with some caution.
Thanks, COD.
posted by flabdablet at 5:24 PM on June 12, 2022 [1 favorite]
Response by poster: So just keep using whatever cloud service is currently working for you and don't bother trying to work around possible or rumoured or even non-current but future-plausible content scanning and deletion policy until it actually bites you - by which time you should have in hand everything you need in order for that bite to prompt no response stronger than "huh, that's annoying" and the uploading of another complete copy of one of your own local backups to a less irritating provider.
I think this is the route I'll be taking.
Thank you all! This was helpful for my peace of mind and now I've got a lot of other options to try out if need be.
posted by rustybullrake at 8:07 AM on June 14, 2022
I think this is the route I'll be taking.
Thank you all! This was helpful for my peace of mind and now I've got a lot of other options to try out if need be.
posted by rustybullrake at 8:07 AM on June 14, 2022
This thread is closed to new comments.
Zip them with a password and then rezip that file with another password.
posted by soelo at 10:03 AM on June 9, 2022