Microsoft patents technology to block pirate material from cloud storage

A new patent from Microsoft could enable the company to not only identify and block pirate material from being shared via cloud services, but also to identify repeat offenders and take action against them.

The patent specifically refers to the ability to identify and block the sharing of "prohibited content," and this could be used to mean copyrighted material, or files that a company simply does not want to be shared. The technology relies on a fingerprinting technique which makes it possible to identify files rather than having to worry about trying to track down and delete files to prevent further sharing.

TorrentFreak explains that Microsoft's patent not only allows for the sharing of material to be blocked, but for individuals who repeatedly break the rules to be identified and punished.

The abstract for the patent, entitled "Disabling prohibited content and identifying repeat offenders in service provider storage system," reads:

Objects in a shared storage system can be marked as including prohibited content. Incidents that result in objects being so marked can be stored in an incident history associated with a user responsible for those objects. The incident history can be processed to identify repeat offenders and modify access privileges of those users. However, when objects are shared by one user with another user, prohibited content is blocked from being shared, while the remainder of the shared objects can be accessed by the other user. Functions that allow sharing of content are implemented so as prevent sharing of prohibited content with another user, while allowing other content to be shared. If a group of files or objects is shared, then the presence of prohibited content in one object in the group results in that prohibited content not being shared, but the remaining files or objects are still shared.

While similar techniques have been used to fingerprint and identify content on sites such as YouTube and Facebook, tracking of offenders is a new component that is likely to be welcomed by copyright holders.

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