Oh FFS, Adobe (two days have gone since birthday, so resuming grump duties once more).
It looks as though any material that you upload through Adobe’s Creative Cloud service (i.e. the cloud part) is scanned for signs of IP infringement and will refuse to allow you to share content if it finds copyrighted material.
That’s just absolute bullshit. A decision, as a professional VFX post-production sysadmin, I find both ludicrous and bordering on near insanity on the part of Adobe.
If you’re a professional post-production outfit and want to use Adobe’s service to share material you’ve been working on with somebody else in the same team or even the client – that material is going to contain copyrighted material (if not your own, but licensed material – temporary soundtracks, etc.)
Adobe have not made any mention of the technology behind the system that they’re going to be using to identify infringing material, nor have they attempted to explain how it will work, how one appeals if it detects an infringement, or anything. Which is bloody stupid. As a professional, I’d be highly insulted by Adobe’s behaviour.
Of course, if it’s something a little more innocent in that their cloud service looks in for digital watermarks created by their own software (something like Digimarc) and stipulates that the content cannot be shared (although why somebody would do this at such a point in time I just don’t know – unless they’re expecting employees to pilfer material and leak it to the internet..) – then fine. But to assume everything uploaded to the Creative Cloud may be infringing on somebody’s copyright would be awful.
With that out the way, you’re not really paying Adobe for the cloud part of the service, are you? Let’s face it. You’re paying Adobe to rent all the CS6 apps. The 20Gb cloud service seems like a mere afterthought. Who will use it? I can’t figure many of my former colleagues in the VFX and media world would consider using this service to share and collaborate. And it’s so basic! Two weeks after launch there isn’t even a desktop file synchronisation client yet. I also find the UI a bit strange. Dropbox and Google Drive it ain’t (two services a lot of people are going to be very familiar with – yes, I did say Google Drive!).
Also many post-production and VFX companies have their own collaborative/sharing/dailies/previewing/asset management systems that provide a mechanism for sharing material safely and securely (and without fear of having a server accuse them of infringing on somebody’s intellectual property).
There are far, far better cloud services (of which I work for a company that specialises in such services – both computational and storage) and third party applications that will work with these services to provide identical – if not better – functionality that Adobe proposes with Creative Cloud. And all without some form of Content ID or assumption that people are going to break the law by uploading material they do not have rights to share.
Oh, I can appreciate that Google implement Content ID on YouTube. But that’s a free service, available for both professionals, prosumers and consumers alike and trying to police 72 hours of video being uploaded every minute is somewhat difficult without some help from a system such as that. But Adobe Creative Cloud is aimed at the prosumer/professional market (and not tweenagers who may not yet have full understanding of copyright) and I’d fully would have expected that Adobe might have had a bit more faith in their customers than to go ahead and deploy a similar system for Creative Cloud.
But let us allow the courts decide what is and what isn’t infringement. Don’t let technological mechanisms which are far from perfect, or random lawyers tell or demand what’s right and what isn’t (with the exception of what I’ve stated above – otherwise Google would need to employ a lot more people to man the abuse department). We have courts for this very purpose and expensive as it may be, that’s the way to go. IP law is unnecessary huge and complex, and trying to let machines deal with it is just asking for trouble.
