14 DAY TRIAL // As one of the companies that are hit by piracy the hardest, Microsoft has recently developed a new technology that can help automatically detect users who are repeatedly sharing pirated content online and block specific cloud features, thus limiting the impact of their actions.
A patent called “Disabling prohibited content and identifying repeat offenders in service provider storage systems” describes a new technology that can limit cloud features for a user who has been marked as a “repeated offender” after trying to share pirated content with another person several times.
If until now taking down the pirated content was the first thing to do, Microsoft is aiming for a more automated solution, so with this new tech, the company could automatically prevent pirates from sharing content stored in the cloud with someone else online.
Furthermore, each user would have an infringement history, and based on the information stored here, the service can determine whether they must be marked as a repeated offender or not.
Disabling sharing feature
“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,” Microsoft describes in patent details.
Most often, the sharing capability would be blocked to prevent content from spreading online, though it’s worth mentioning that in most cases, the company will probably investigate as well and users who are trying to share pirated software or games on the Internet could face other actions too.
Keep in mind, however, that this is just a patent for the time being, though it’s worth mentioning that Microsoft filed it in November 2013 and the original publication date is May 2015. There’s a good chance that Microsoft is already working on features for its cloud service that can mark repeated pirates using its own service, but we’ve reached out to the company and will provide more info as soon as it is provided.