This is an issue that none of the cloud providers have solved. I had 250,000 CD rips from various record labels at one point. I had full authorization from them, but it looks like I'm a massive pirate.
It should look like you're a massive pirate -- if you have hundreds of people downloading those CD rips from your Gdrive. If you're the only one accessing your own files, it shouldn't matter how many rips you have. Don't know how it works in practice.
To clarify, this was not a shared folder.
Of course, that is an edge case which Google would need to figure out and perhaps, one of the many reasons they haven't done it.
Sadly I expect that Google will "handle" those edge cases the same way they handle similar issues on Youtube: have a lot of false positives and tell users to pound sand, except for cases where the outrage goes viral.
> that is an edge case which Google would need to figure out
How do you figure out legality of having a document from the document? Unless it's child porn, where it's implicit, this simply isn't computable.
Maintaining a hash of say music files that are owned by large record label companies or a conglomerate like VeVo, match every audio file uploaded with the hash and if it matches, flag it, get it reviewed and if it matches, delete it?
That does not answer legality.
However, VeVo can say that no one can keep MP3 records if it isn't hosted on iTunes, YouTube Music or Spotify etc
In my country that would be almost certainly illegal. Not even copyright holders can tell you what you can do with your personal copies of copyrighted works, short of distributing them to someone else. By law they're explicitly prevented from doing that.
The cloud is "someone else".
Not necessarily for the purpose of our copyright act. Neither is your personal bank deposit box if you put a book in it. You're not transferring ownership of your belongings to the bank if you put something in it.
Assuming for video content they use their existing YouTube Content ID library, they can exclude/allow their Google accounts to have that content, or host it under the same user as their YT channel.
Is it an edge case? Thanks to copyright's assault on the public domain, almost everything is copyrighted. Is making a backup of your movies, music, and e-books unusual?
What assault on public domain?
Copyright is supposed to be temporary. Instead terms have been extended to essentially infinite durations. The copyright industry has robbed us of our public domain rights.
Well they still haven't figured it out with YouTube.
Still might not have the license to agree to the necessary terms to upload it to a third party cloud storage