Not to get in the middle of the “legal” battle here… my $0.02 is that yes… if you upload files that are copyrighted, then technically they could suspend your account for violating TOS, but that’s what they have to say for legal protection on their end. We have evidence that they only use the file hashes when you create a share link, because that is when they truly can get in trouble (i.e. sharing that link to pirated sites is what gains them loads of DMCA takedown requests)… but the way Plex accesses the media, the copyright holders won’t be able to tell which accounts the Plex cloud servers are connected to, so almost no risk of DMCA takedowns. (If copyright holders had the ability to make Plex give them any data about the files people were sharing with their product, Plex would have died years ago). And Plex does NOT create share links, so no need on the hosting provider’s part to check against the hashes. Doesn’t mean the responsibility isn’t on the user to ‘not upload copyrighted content’, but I’m saying the risk is incredibly low of your account getting suspended for that reason.
I say that as someone who has had all my TV shows in Google Drive for years as a backup, with not a single notice or complaint from Google.
And let’s be honest here. Plex is no small fish anymore. The Plex Cloud release made headlines on many major tech sites today. Google Microsoft Amazon and Dropbox are well aware of this service, and if they wanted to block it, they could have during the beta. They aren’t going to, because ultimately, this will likely result in more revenue for them (in the form of people choosing to pay for storage rather than building their own server). They have the infrastructure to support it, and I guarantee you if a service as large as Plex was going to launch something of this scale, they didn’t do it without a conversation happening with the hosting providers. But, in said conversation, Plex spins it the same way that they’ve always spun it, that this is personal home media or owned content, and they have no actual connection or liability for the files. That protects plex, and the hosting providers, and although everyone subtly understands what is happening here, it’s all quiet and protected by release of liability.
So yes, ultimately, the responsibility is on us as users to make sure we own the rights to everything we upload to the cloud, and hopefully we all do… (hopefully…), but the chances of you getting sucked into a legal battle over Plex cloud is incredibly low if not entirely nonexistent IMO if ALL you do with the uploaded content is access it through Plex cloud.
Now… if you want to talk about G-Suite for Education and the whole “Unlimited” storage factor… that’s a whole different topic (actually, that’s the topic that brought me to this thread)… my guess is Google is Not going to just stand by and allow people to upload terabytes of TV shows to G-Suite for EDU and access it through Plex. Time will tell, but I’m actually in the process of testing this right now (uploading ~20TB to a G-Suite EDU account that is connected to Plex Cloud (has been for the past month)), we’ll see if anything happens. I’ll report back if it gets suspended.
Interesting topic. Curious to see how this all plays out.
