In some sense, this is a return to form for digital scallawags who once relied on (now defunct) file-hosting sites like Megaupload and YouSendIt to share music and video. No need to head into these waters - Google Drive might just offer a safer harbor. Putting a collection of those links in one Drive and sharing it over social media is like passing around a secret phonebook containing the listings for all your favorite pirated content. The offending goods reportedly include both your standard video files as well as a unique twist on the file sharing MO: Instead of uploading entire movies or shows to Drive itself, people are dropping in scores of unlisted YouTube links.Įssentially, the idea is that unlisted links are less likely to be spotted by automated systems crawling for this sort of thing and are therefore less likely to be pulled. It's business in the front, illegal file-sharing in the back.Īccording to Gadgets360, which reviewed a host of DMCA takedown requests, copyright holders filed almost 5,000 requests in August for Google to pull material from Drive - compared to approximately 100 requests for file-hosting site MEGA and less than 12 requests for Dropbox. While those looking to score, say, pirated Game of Thrones episodes may first turn to big-name torrenting sites like The Pirate Bay, copyright scofflaws in the know are apparently taking advantage of the generous free 15GB of storage offered by Google Drive to host and share copies of popular movies and television shows. Google Drive will soon let you backup your entire computer

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