If I were a major content provider trying to assert my rights over my material - as, for instance the recording and movie industries do - I'd find this warning from Shelly Palmer very disturbing. Writing at JackMyers.com, the Managing Director of Advanced Media Ventures Group LLC, notes some possibly unintended consequences from cloud storage computing.
He's talking about the companies that now specialize in providing large-file off-site storage space for companies and individuals. Most of us use these for backups, to free up local disk space. But Palmer notes that a casual friend of his, in the course of an email exchange, was able to offer him a link to a very large HD movie video on the friend's storage cloud. As Palmer says..."Yikes!"
Now think about it for a moment. Most of us, generally wouldn't dream of downloading a pirated movie for a variety of reasons - from a concern about piracy (and, as a writer, I am opposed to freeloaders) to a practical concern that we may be downloading a virus or other malware along with that pirated music or movie.
But if a friend sends a link to a private storage site where he's put a movie he uploaded from his own computer - well, where's the downside? Except, of course, that it's piracy. But that's a hotly debated point, isn't it - is it that much different from handing my HD movie disk to friends for them to take home and view?
And unfortunately, as Palmer points out, it probably won't take the pirates long to move in on this "legitimate" form of storage:
At the end of the day, P2P networks and strange or alien files are not going to cause any more economic hardship for the content industry than they are causing right now. However, good natured, good citizens using private storage clouds are going to be hugely hurtful. And, if good citizens can cause irreparable harm by paving the road to hell, imagine what bad natured, bad citizens will be able to accomplish with the same technology. Trust me, the computer network does not know the nature of its users.
It has to be a frightening prospect for anyone owning the rights to movies and music.