1. Pirates uploaded a folder full of copyrighted files to Google Drive, accidentally including some DS_Store files along with the actual media.
2. The copyright owner filed a DMCA takedown on the whole folder, accidentally claiming ownership of a bunch of generic DS_Store files.
3. The above two steps have likely happened many times, not just once.
4. Google's takedown system now automatically flags DS_Store files as having multiple copyright violations.
5. A Google employee might be able to whitelist a user's individual DS_Store files to temporarily suppress the violation on their account, but since they can appear in different folders with different data and are constantly receiving new copyright claims, their system likely errs on the side of caution and continues to flag them as copyright violations so that Google doesn't accidentally lose its safe harbor protections.
In theory, a Google engineer could code in a special case to avoid this problem, but good luck finding and talking to one who's authorized to do so; Google is notorious for having one of the lowest employee;revenue ratios in the world and writing useless FAQs instead of having a proper support channel for when things go wrong.
That's a good question. I get the impression the system is fairly opaque even to the people working there. I was told it was "resolved" and had my ticket closed a bunch of times, only to have another 30+ copyright violation emails the next time someone uploaded a batch of files from MacOS.
If the person who finally managed to figure it out ends to reading this, thanks for the resolution :)
