China has started cracking down on cloud storage to combat piracy

Online piracy is so prevalent in many parts of Asia that actually purchasing content is considered unusual, especially in China. The rapid growth of cloud storage in the country has made it even easier for people to download and share pirated content online, thanks to the affordability of cloud storage in China and the lack of strong regulations to combat piracy, but that’s starting to change. Earlier this week, the Chinese government started requiring cloud storage providers to have more stringent anti-piracy policies, and take a more active role in removing pirated content from their services. 

Everybody loves the cloud. It’s what allows us to access all of our documents and files from everywhere, and store gigabytes of video without eating into limited local hard drive space. This is especially true in China, where free cloud storage options are amazing. Baidu offers two terabytes of cloud storage for free. Tencent offers 10 TB free. That kind of service would cost you $100 a month from Google Drive; it’s no wonder that Chinese web users are storing anything and everything in the cloud. As a result, though, China’s public cloud has become a bit of a haven for piracy. Not every file in the cloud is shared publicly, of course, but files can be shared publicly, and public files are searchable. When I searched for “Star Wars” on Baidu’s public cloud, for example, one of the first things I found was a download link for the entire film Episode I: The Phantom Menace. Episode I was a terrible film, of course. But there’s plenty of good film, TV, and music available for free on China’s public cloud sites, too. And now, Chinese authorities are doing something about it. The nation’s copyright authorities published a new order on Wednesday that tasks cloud service providers with getting way more serious about copyright infringement.