For some time now, Google, along with some producers and authors of digital works, has been discarding the positioning of the main Internet pages with pirated content, such as Cinetux or Gnula. After several months of de-indexing pages whose content is based on series and movies protected with copyright, a new rival has arrived in the form of a web storage in the cloud, and it is neither more nor less than Google Drive. As we have seen in Tuexperto.com, the search engine is indexing works of various kinds hosted on the Google Drive servers : from first-run movies to latest wave series.
Watching series and movies online is now possible with Google Drive
Not Megadede, not Popcorn Time: it is Google that provides much of the pirated content on the Internet. Where does this content come from? From the platform users themselves.
I just learned that you can search: google docs * the name of any movie * and watch it for free.
Rttt to stop someone who has had enough of netflix and virulent pages. pic.twitter.com/3ArI99srdt
- ste nene (@ Colunga1881) September 12, 2019
Apparently, Google is indexing the content that users make public in their personal Google Drive account. Nothing new under the sun. The problem is that this content is protected by current copyright law . To test a button: we will only have to indicate in the Google search the name of the series or film and the words 'Google Docs' or 'Google Drive'. We can try different combinations of formats: MP4, AVI, MKV and so on.
The result, as we can see in the screenshots, is similar to that of any website with registered content: films of various themes, full chapters of successful series, television programs or documentaries classified by episodes. How I Met Your Mother, Titanic and Hercules are some examples of indexed content, but also more recent series like Breaking Bad. Simply type the name or number and season of the chapter and Google will solve the search with content from Drive.
As if this were not enough, Google Drive allows the downloading and dissemination of the content in question through the application options as if it were any other document, which leaves the filtering of the platform in question.
This is what the law says
Given this fact, it is inevitable to elucidate about the illegality of this type of practice. In 2017, a similar case came to light as a result of the Dallas Buyer Club complaint of a user who shared illegal content.
The judgment of the trial, in favor of the defendant, dictated the following:
There are not sufficient legal grounds to prove the infringement, since there is no evidence that there was “public communication” as required by the Intellectual Property Law for such infringement to take place. Article 20 of the LPI defines Public Communication as any act by which a plurality of people can have access to a work without prior distribution of copies to each of them.
Extract extracted from Intereconomía.com
We can deduce, therefore, that this fact does not violate the illegality. Only in the event that the work is disseminated through public communication channels will an offense punishable by law be committed: in no case will the possession or indexing by third parties imply an infringement of the Intellectual Property Law .