Everybody loves the cloud. It’s what allows us to access all of our documents and files from everywhere, and store gigabytes of video without eating into limited local hard drive space.
This is especially true in China, where free cloud storage options are amazing. Baidu offers two terabytes of cloud storage for free. Tencent offers 10 TB free. That kind of service would cost you $100 a month from Google Drive; it’s no wonder that Chinese web users are storing anything and everything in the cloud.
As a result, though, China’s public cloud has become a bit of a haven for piracy. Not every file in the cloud is shared publicly, of course, but files can be shared publicly, and public files are searchable. When I searched for “Star Wars” on Baidu’s public cloud, for example, one of the first things I found was a download link for the entire film Episode I: The Phantom Menace.
Episode I was a terrible film, of course. But there’s plenty of good film, TV, and music available for free on China’s public cloud sites, too. And now, Chinese authorities are doing something about it. The nation’s copyright authorities published a new order on Wednesday that tasks cloud service providers with getting way more serious about copyright infringement. Among other things, cloud providers must:
- Make a clear notice on their homepages about copyrighted content and infringement and reporting methods
- Take down copyright-infringing content within 24 hours of it being reported
- Take effective steps to prevent users from uploading, storing, and sharing copyrighted works in the first place
- Cease editing, ranking, promoting, or otherwise publicizing user-uploaded content to other users
- Suspend or blacklist users who repeatedly upload illegal content
Of course, as with any Chinese government pronouncement, it remains to be seen how thoroughly and effectively any of this will be enforced. China’s cloud can’t remain a safe haven for pirates forever, but I wouldn’t bet on a quick cleanup of the area either.
(And yes, we’re serious about ethics and transparency. More information here.)
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