Plex Cloud Freakout

General Discussions
61

My 2 cents…

Amazon can scan my files and find that I have uploaded movie and music rips. It is not illegal for me to possess rips of material that I have purchased. In many cases I have downloaded rips of content that I own. Many of you with slower machines likely do the same. With the advent of H.265 even people with extremely fast machines may well follow suit. There is no way for Amazon to tell whether or not the rips contravene copyright laws.

Amazon clearly states that you alone are responsible for ensuring your files are not contraband…

“You are solely responsible for Your Files and for complying with all applicable copyright and other laws, including import and export control laws and regulations, and with the terms of any licenses or agreements to which you are bound.”

So the problem, as I see it, is if you are found to be running a file sharing service. In that instance it doesn’t matter how you came to possess the content, you are breaking copyright laws by distributing it to others. This is, to the best of my knowledge, the action for which people have been viciously prosecuted in the USA. Simple possession would be extremely difficult to detect, prove, and prosecute.

Plex facilitates the viewing by others of content you choose to share with them. It does not allow them to easily make a copy or add it to their own library. This may or may not contravene copyright laws depending on where you live, with whom you share the content, how many others you share the content with, their relationship to you, etc… I have loaned CD’s, DVD’s, Bluray’s to friends in the past. Am I violating my countries copyright laws by doing so? Nope. Did they copy them? Maybe. Heck, my local library even lends them out.

Plex makes it easier to borrow content from a friend but much harder for them to keep a copy. Since it is, by design, private, requiring a personal invitation to connect. It is not only hard to detect but, in most countries, illegal to eavesdrop on. So, as the Plex moderators have already made clear… don’t run a file sharing service and you should be fine. Should. The risks, if any, are yours to assess give the specifics of your situation. The consequences, if any, are yours alone to bear.

(The foregoing should not be construed as legal advice. The author accepts no responsibility for any blah blah blah, lorem opium…)

62

Someone else may have already stated this, in fact I would bet the Plex Employees have…

Plex Cloud means that the media AND THE SERVER are in cloud. IF your media was encrypted, then either 1) ALL client apps would have to be powerful to the level of being able to un-encrypt the stream, or 2) ALL you media would have to be processed (un-encrypted by the server, dare say similar to transcoding) before it could leave the Amazon cloud.

Option 1 needs powerful enough client devices. Option 2 basically eliminates Direct Play as the Server HAS to process all files.

63

@mandrup said:
My only reason for wanting encryption is because of my home videos featuring my children. SHOULD Amazon get hacked, I want NO risk at all that videos of my children will end up in the hands of pedophiles or other nasty people. Like most people who have home videos with their small children, they can contain partial nudity of my children, as they are bathing in the pool or similar stuff.

Unless you are a famous hot chick, no hacker cares about your videos. Plex Cloud doesn’t need encryption. If you want encryption, then store them somewhere else that already offers this capability. You can’t possibly have that much data in home videos anyways.

Anyway, if people are ripping their own discs, they will have different hash values anyway so Amazon wouldn’t be able to save any space.

Only gain of not encrypting is to save space on all the pirated stuff people are uploading

Even if I were buying them, I would still download them and let someone else do the work. It’s 1000 times faster to download it then to rip your own discs. Even if people were ripping their own, there are only so many versions of the same movie or tv show so there wouldn’t be as many differences as you might think.

Besides, just because you are uploading a movie to your cloud storage, does not automatically make it illegal nor can it be proven where it came from in the first place. There is no difference in a movie you ripped yourself versus one you downloaded. I have thousands of blue-ray and dvds and I cannot prove that I purchased them or where they came from, that doesn’t automatically mean I stole them. For that matter, I have digital copies that I purchased from time to time over the years and I also cannot prove that I purchased these either or even remember where they came from to even try.

So unless you are publicly sharing your cloud drive with the purpose of sharing for download and allowing people to make copies, there is literally no risk involved here simply having Plex store your content in the cloud. Even then the risk is pretty low. They have learned their lessen in going after consumers/fans. If anyone might get sued, it will be Plex/Amazon and that is still pretty low as well. Cloud storage has to have the same level of privacy and protection as you copying it to your own backup storage, otherwise the business model will never work and people won’t use it. So I wouldn’t worry about it, personally. Unless you plan on trying to make a video streaming business or share your Plex to everyone on the internet, you will be fine, no one cares.

64

Considering encryption: I’ve read through a bunch of this thread. And I’m a person who bought a PLEX PASS specifically for the Cloud Sync/Cloud Server capabilities. My home PLEX server sits behind a VPN connection, so it can’t be accessed outside of my local network without some kind of complex workaround. The PLEX cloud options should fix that problem.

In the modern era it’s appropriate to require & use encryption, everywhere. The reasons for it are many, the arguments against it are null. PLEX should seek to allow encryption, for all inter-network connections, and for cloud storage, period. Amazon should seek to allow all the data it stores to be encrypted, and transported securely, period.

Seems a logical workaround would be an encrypted container, or several (divided by a MAX size perhaps). Data stored in Amazon’s cloud is likely already divided up in some specific fashion, in order to control who has access to what. It seems reasonable to assume that they could create encrypted containers, or allow the creation of encrypted containers on their servers, that could then be mounted on demand and accessed just like any hard drive partition.

My local hard drives are all encrypted, they all mount on OS load, and all of the data can be accessed by my home PLEX server; which has no idea that the data is encrypted. Seems to me that the PLEX Cloud/Cloud Sync systems could be pretty easily set up to log in to and automatically access such encrypted locations on a third party system; though it may require some participation from Amazon to set up. PLEX would have to pass along the keys, and the Amazon system would have to use them to mount the container/drive (without storing them), then all the data would be accessible so long as the connection stayed open.

I also use CrashPlan to backup all my data, FYI, and all of that data is stored in the cloud, and is encrypted. I can even access all my files that have been backed up to CrashPlan remotely via mobile or PC app. Some files can be viewed on the fly, like pictures. Some files have to be downloaded to view. And video files can not be streamed (last I checked anyway).

“CrashPlan subscribers can surround their digital life with 448-bit encryption, including a private key option.”

Amazon currently allows streaming, but only for videos shorter than 20min.

Seems to me there are solutions out there for implementing a system whereby PLEX and Amazon could combine efforts to create a personal, and secure/encrypted, Cloud Streaming service.

How does the saying go: “where there’s a will there’s a way!”

65

@rckoegel said:
Seems to me there are solutions out there for implementing a system whereby PLEX and Amazon could combine efforts to create a personal, and secure/encrypted, Cloud Streaming service.

I don’t understand the people requesting encryption for Plex Cloud. Even if you’re storing the data encrypted on Amazon, the Plex Cloud server has to be able to decrypt it in order to play it, so you’re just shifting the burden from Amazon (if you had un-encrypted data there) to Plex. The encryption keys would still be on a server somewhere that’s accessible online, ie it could be hacked. How is that any more secure?

66

Because…stuff.

67

It is just a media server after all. I don’t get why anyone cares about encryption, personally. Other than the login, I don’t even know why we have SSL. It isn’t necessary for anything except that. Actual hackers or the government could care less what is on your Plex server. People are not sniffing your packets to try and find out what you are watching.