Pirates went through a rough patch this past year. Shortly after KickassTorrents and its alleged owner Artem Vaulin went down, competing sites Torrentz.eu and TorrentHound swiftly followed suit. But while The Pirate Bay is still there to hold the fort, an unlikely alternative is starting to shape up: Google Drive.
Hollywood studios and other copyright holders have inundated the Mountain View heavyweight with nearly 5,000 takedown requests for files hosted on its cloud storage service in the last 30 days alone, Gadgets 360 reports.
In fact, Google’s cloud service has become such a popular recourse to The Pirate Bay that, according to popular link removal platform Lumen Database, each infringing DMCA complaint is accompanied by at least a dozen Drive-hosted files.
Pirates appear to have come up with various workarounds to slip through Google’s defenses. Though they would often use Drive to share downloadable links for media files, other times they would merely share empty links with embedded YouTube videos to avoid detection.
This is the same loophole porn pirates exploited to host smut flicks on YouTube back in January.
But here’s the thing: To avoid getting caught, pirates have made all of these clips unlisted and have instead opted to distribute them on numerous underground forums, Facebook groups and other discussion boards. This makes it more difficult for both Google and copyright holders to discover and flag such files.
Earlier this year, the internet giant revealed it has began using a technique, more commonly known as file-hashing, to thwart the spread of infringing content early on, but it turns that approach isn’t entirely foolproof.
