Plex Cloud: Questions about sharing, copyright and encryption

General Discussions
21

@OwlBoy said:
Guys, I know this is different in many ways, but Plex has been in the business of profiting off this type of stuff for years. They know what they are doing.

Right, but people aren’t worried about Plex in this situation. A new player has entered the game and arguably would be in control of the most important (valuable? risky?) piece of the puzzle: the content.

Plex needs to be clear how they plan on working through this, from a technical and policy with Amazon standpoint. They have been excellent in the past about wording things carefully to essentially avoid liability, and I agree they know what they are doing, but Amazon is a different story.

To be blunt, unless we can fully encrypt/hide “things” that we store there, I don’t see this ending well for most Plex users.

22

@ryanmclaughlin said:

@OwlBoy said:
Guys, I know this is different in many ways, but Plex has been in the business of profiting off this type of stuff for years. They know what they are doing.

Right, but people aren’t worried about Plex in this situation. A new player has entered the game and arguably would be in control of the most important (valuable? risky?) piece of the puzzle: the content.

Plex needs to be clear how they plan on working through this, from a technical and policy with Amazon standpoint. They have been excellent in the past about wording things carefully to essentially avoid liability, and I agree they know what they are doing, but Amazon is a different story.

To be blunt, unless we can fully encrypt/hide “things” that we store there, I don’t see this ending well for most Plex users.

This has already been going on for over a year with Cloud Sync on Amazon (And Google, and Dropbox, and Box, and OneDrive, and Bitcasa, and Copy) Has anyone gotten busted or have any of the services discontinued support due to infringement? I feel like they would not have moved to Plex Cloud if Cloud Sync had seen DMCA issues.

What point am I missing about Cloud Sync being different? I can share my Cloud Sync share with friends.

23

There are going to be a lot of users complaining when Amazon suspends their accounts and lose access to their media libraries.

Without encryption, I feel like this is just a ticking time bomb.

24

@sdjme said:
There are going to be a lot of users complaining when Amazon suspends their accounts and lose access to their media libraries.

Without encryption, I feel like this is just a ticking time bomb.

It has been for 2+ years now because Cloud Sync is doing the exact same thing, minus the “no local server needed” part.

25

Well I was excited about this but now I think I might wait…I’ll keep reading these threads on it for now

26

I do not think you understand, encrypted or not does not protect your from Amazon, only from being hacked from outside of AWS. People lose their Cloud accounts all the time for this very reason, sharing illegal content. It is so much so that it is not a Lime-Light worth event. So as to mitigate legal cost in run you through “The Mill” they simply warn you a few times and then if you fail to comply they just block your account.

I know this because I have a family member who worked at Amazon on their security and privacy team and now works for Microsoft. Accounts do get locked out for this very reason.

Put aside the legal ramification of it all, I do not think the solution is going to gain much ground even if everyone plays by the book. Streaming 4K and above content is going to hit your pipe really hard and your ISP is going to get really pissed and start capping your usage. Then as other join this Band Wagon they will simply impose a across the board cap on everyone regardless if your are part of it or not. So the people who do not have high data usage will suffer because of other people actions. I almost feel that Plex should pull this offering just for this purpose alone.

I do not think that Plex has much to benefit here, because most people will, after hopping on, will realize that they cannot stream much with out increasing their pipe and will just give all together put this offering into an expense from a maintenance and support perspective and realize that it is now costing them more money to support it than the amount new purchase will allow to support. I honestly think that Plex is reaching for additional revenue as most Plex users are either running the free edition or bit the bullet for the Live Time Plex Pass and now they are in need of a cash flow.

This is just my opinion.

27

@OwlBoy said:
This has already been going on for over a year with Cloud Sync on Amazon (And Google, and Dropbox, and Box, and OneDrive, and Bitcasa, and Copy) Has anyone gotten busted or have any of the services discontinued support due to infringement? I feel like they would not have moved to Plex Cloud if Cloud Sync had seen DMCA issues.

No one has gotten busted. There are some rumors over on reddit, but no concrete evidence. Just people being paranoid and repeating the same rumors.

Amazon and other cloud providers are in the business of selling you a service, not scanning your files and looking to terminate your $60/year fee.

Look at Google Music. No one has been busted for uploading questionable MP3s to their service. This is just the same service, but with video.

The MPAA isn’t going after users of ACD. How can they? They can’t see what I have stored there, and Amazon isn’t going to tell them. Why would they? What’s in it for them? Heck, its getting harder to go after actual pirates since your IP address no longer proves you are the one downloading something. As long as you aren’t hosting a Plex server with 1000s of users and selling a service, no one is going after you.

28

I disagree, people have gotten busted. Reddit is just another rumor mill. However I do agree that Amazon will not go after you just because, but when their hand is forced by Hollywood or the music industry. Granted most Plex Cloud users are not going to flip their content for a buck and this is far from SlyFox or Napster scenario, but a lot of people are just not going to throw their content up into the cloud. Pictures and some small family videos, maybe. Most will rather spend $200-$300 on a half way decent NAS with more storage than they will ever use, register the unit and install the app across their devices. It is just a secure if not more so and they can turn it off to the world far easier and faster than the cloud.

Again, I think this defeats the purpose of what Plex was built for in the first place. Also mark my words, ISP will start capping if not that then they will flip over to charging you per byte transferred across your connection. This will surely kill Plex Cloud.

29

I must be doing it wrong because I have yet to find the half way decent NAS with more storage than I will ever use for $200-$300!

30

@OwlBoy said:
Has anyone gotten busted or have any of the services discontinued support due to infringement?
@skubiszm @NVader2000 there are no “rumors” regarding this on Reddit.
There are some people who used the “Share” function with copyrighted material and as a result got their Sharing feature disabled.

There is not one case reported where are an account has been entirely banned even those who use extremely high storage (100 TB+):

31

Regarding the point about the “Share Function” being blocked as a punishment, Plex Cloud does not use the “Share Function” of ACD

32

The simple point is this: No one should put any content on public cloud storage that is unencrypted, whether it’s illegal content or home videos/pictures. If you put torrented movies, it’s inevitable that they crack down on the account. I’m not sure how anyone can say those are just rumors, just look around and you can see numerous instances of it.

Don’t trust a corporation to put your internet over their own. Amazon is a content provider in many different ways and actually have more of an incentive that other companies to crack down on it as they stream and sell the content.

33

@jashrewsbury said:
I’m not sure how anyone can say those are just rumors, just look around and you can see numerous instances of it.
Then show us those “numerous” instances from Amazon Drive with sources.

34

Im more worried about amazon getting hacked and pictures /videos of my children pouring into the Internet. I dont know about you, but my home videos could show partial nudity of my kids while using our private pool or something, which close family members wouldnt think about. But if a pervert got a hand of this, it would suddently be used by pedophiles.

35

Quick Question:

Has anyone from Plex thought about integrating this with a platform like mega.nz instead?

Their files are heavily encrypted in such a way that even the team from Mega can’t access them (even if they wanted to). This seems to me like it would be a better approach.

Edit: Shikes! https://techcrunch.com/2015/07/31/kim-dotcom-is-not-involved-with-mega-anymore-plans-to-build-yet-another-cloud-storage-service/

OK, maybe bot Mega, but something like it, haha.

36

@NVader2000 said:
I do not think you understand, encrypted or not does not protect your from Amazon, only from being hacked from outside of AWS. […]
That’s not true. Any meaningful encryption will be done outside of Amazon’s cloud, and sent back and forth to the Cloud Drive in encrypted form. Thus, Amazon can not access the original contents of the files, only the encrypted file,

37

@NVader2000 said:
I disagree, people have gotten busted. Reddit is just another rumor mill. However I do agree that Amazon will not go after you just because, but when their hand is forced by Hollywood or the music industry. Granted most Plex Cloud users are not going to flip their content for a buck and this is far from SlyFox or Napster scenario, but a lot of people are just not going to throw their content up into the cloud. Pictures and some small family videos, maybe. Most will rather spend $200-$300 on a half way decent NAS with more storage than they will ever use, register the unit and install the app across their devices. It is just a secure if not more so and they can turn it off to the world far easier and faster than the cloud.

Again, I think this defeats the purpose of what Plex was built for in the first place. Also mark my words, ISP will start capping if not that then they will flip over to charging you per byte transferred across your connection. This will surely kill Plex Cloud.

Hi to all and whoever else is reading…

I totally agree with your posts and would like to ask you if I can quote your posts in this thread with others because your opinion is valid and I think it answers a lot of questions that appeared with Plex Cloud.

I personally think that NO ONE is going to guarantee ever the legal/copyright part of the issue EVER.

It could go encrypted/decrypted or whatever you people want to call it.

If your government/authorities/ISP ask to cancel your account then Amazon will cancel it without notice or dispute without the owner of the account having the right to say anything.

This means that the library goes to the trash…

And I am not saying that people don´t use this for personal file or personal library but we all know that most of us human beings also use it for other means. But I didn´t say this ok?

Believe this happened not long ago with DYNSDNS accounts all over the world being cancelled in a blink of an eye without any notice and without the right to say anything at all.

Thanks and I will be back and hope the idea that is great continues.

38

@peterhjalmarsson said:

@NVader2000 said:
I do not think you understand, encrypted or not does not protect your from Amazon, only from being hacked from outside of AWS. […]
That’s not true. Any meaningful encryption will be done outside of Amazon’s cloud, and sent back and forth to the Cloud Drive in encrypted form. Thus, Amazon can not access the original contents of the files, only the encrypted file,

@peterhjalmarsson is correct. Done properly all data would be encrypted locally, then sent across an encrypted connection to Cloud Drive where it resides in its encrypted form. From Amazon’s perspective it is a large chunk of random bits. Keep the key private and no one will ever see @Ithiel’s naked children. Or your backup copy of ‘Gigli (2003)’.

But see, that might the problem. If only you have the key, then how is the Plex Cloud Server going to transcode the content? How will its Scanner even see the content to know what it is? When Plex Cloud sees the same chunks of random bits, Bennifer is nowhere to be found.

For it to work as intended while addressing your data privacy concerns, Plex would need to offer some sort of uploader to run locally, encrypting items before it sends them off to Cloud Drive and then storing the keys in your Plex Pass account for the Plex Cloud Server to use for decryption upon retrieval.

Some have pointed out that similar things are being done by StableBit’s CloudDrive, and I would also mention Haystack Software’s Arq Backup. But it’s important to note that with both of those products the encryption key is not shared with anyone; both encryption AND decryption is performed locally. Not so simple when a third party is expected to stream an old episode of ‘Trick My Truck’ to your sister-in-law’s Roku.

I’ve got some content I wouldn’t upload without encryption. And plenty of content that I would. Plex Cloud is going to greatly enhance my Plex experience; it’s not going to replace it. I got into this stuff for the thrill of the build, just like a lot of the Plex team did. I see no reason to worry that they’ll turn their backs on the good ol’ on-the-metal Plex Media Server.

39

@sixhoursago said:
I’ve got some content I wouldn’t upload without encryption. And plenty of content that I would. Plex Cloud is going to greatly enhance my Plex experience; it’s not going to replace it. I got into this stuff for the thrill of the build, just like a lot of the Plex team did. I see no reason to worry that they’ll turn their backs on the good ol’ on-the-metal Plex Media Server.

Well put. I also see Plex Cloud as an ‘addition’ to my current Plex setup. I do hope that delivers since it would be a great service.

40

@NVader2000 said:
This is surely going to get very interesting. Yes, I agree that you must own a legal copy of the media that you so choose to upload to AWS. However, even if everyone plays by the book, there is the P2P concept that will eventually spawn from this. Plex today allows you to share your content and most are not so willing to do so beyond their family or very close friends. However a Rogue Plex user is born. Said Rogue Plex user starts sharing their entire 100Tb library to the world. This is the part that I think AWS will have an issue with regardless if it is encrypted or not. AWS is now the largest PSP site in the world and they WILL shut that down.

On a personal note, however I do have a strong love for cloud, I would not want my personal “legally owned” content up on any cloud hosted storage, encrypted or not. Plus the bandwidth to stream all that content is not only going to be sub-par in comparison to local network bandwidth, but your ISP is going to get really pissed at your data usage and will start imposing data caps. 4K is here and 8K and 16K is just around the corner. You are going to need a lot more than 100Mb (sustained) FiOS circuit to be able to get the full quality (or N4KQ) 4K or anything 4K or greater.

I understand Plex’s reason to offer such an option, family photos and videos that have miniumal impact to starage and bandwidth but in reality most of the Plex users are using it to stream DVD/Blu-Ray videos to their TV and Home Theaters and with cheap NAS devices and the wide support by Plex for these devices I would think most user would prefer to keep their stuff in house. So I think for the short term and/or a very small community will adopt Plex Cloud.

Now lets add in “the hacker” this just took on a whole new direction and I foresee every Plex Cloud user pulling out. Sorry Plex, this is just no worth it no matter how you spin it.

a lot of what you say I do agree with,
however although 4K is out, with 8k and 16k round the corner, the majority of people do not have 4k TVs yet.
Additionally you could stream h265 (even though plex is not yet 100% ready for it), some apps/devices can work with it.

Literally the day before plex cloud was announced I was thinking of building a Microsoft Azure VM with a ton of storage and bandwidth, which could easily stream 4k and above assuming the client side has enough downstream bandwidth.

You think rogue users of plex dont already share?
Theres an entire reddit of people using other clouds to do it looool.

I work in cyber security so yes AWS can be hacked, BUT to find one single persons files on a set of instances is very difficult, and all the cloud storage providers can ‘mirror’ data or move it from location to location without anyone knowing.

The cloud providers CDN (content delivery network) is the most important part, so it will be fine,
to anyone considering it,
I only suggest storing music/tv/films you own, nothing personal.
And make sure you have it backed up just in case you need to DL it.