Practically all original content -- as distinct from *facts* -- that is not in the public domain has a copyright owned by someone. The bad poem you wrote at university? Copyright owned by you. The email you wrote your colleague last week about the TPS reports? Copyright owned by your employer. Those home videos your parents made when you were a baby? Yep, copyright is owned by your parents. I own the copyright to this comment; El Reg has a license I granted as a condition of being allowed to post it here. Your copy of Linux contains files with hundreds of copyright holders. And so on.
It's common to express ideas vaguely (Google's communication is an example of making this worse), and when most people say "copyrighted content" what they really mean is content to which the speaker doesn't have a license, or has a license that doesn't allow arbitrary distribution. But that's wildly different from what "copyright [sic] material" really means, and in fact nearly everything everyone stores anywhere is subject to copyright. It's true that with the kind of extremely low-entropy content described by this article (as well as performances of the infamous 4'33" etc) things get dicey, but that isn't how I interpreted your question. It's perfectly fine to store works subject to copyright on these services; if it weren't they wouldn't be useful.
The problem here is missing metadata, specifically (a) whether the piece of data is subject to copyright, (b) the identity of the copyright owner if so, and (c) the terms of any license to it held by the account owner who's storing it. From that it would be possible to determine conclusively whether or not a work's presence at a particular storage location is infringing. Without it, their actions represent at best an unreliable guess and at worst opaque, asymmetrical, and abusive pandering to giant corporations at everyone else's expense. Wikipedia have done this pretty well: they associate this kind of metadata with the objects they store, which makes it easy to detect problems or document the basis for a work's use. Google, of course, provide their customers with no way to record that metadata, which is why anyone serious about document control uses something else.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
