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Dropbox Attempts To Kill Open Source Project
Meskarune writes "Dropbox is trying to kill the Dropship project, a useful program that allows users to import files into their accounts using hashes and bypassing the need to make files public. Dropbox sent out fake DMCA requests to all parties involved, and is banning and censoring the program."
Wouldn't an attempt to intentionally mislead someone with regard to DMCA be regarded as fraud?
Okay, according to the update at the bottom of the link (I know, I RTFA, weird, eh?),
Update: I want clear up a few things. As far as I’m aware all of the Dropship repositories and archives that were taken down was done so voluntarily. Dropbox never made threats, legal or otherwise. It appears the DMCA notice was automatically sent to me when the file was banned from public sharing. There was no real DMCA takedown issued. It was an edge case bug in their file removal system.
Apparently, Dropbox is asking nicely, but when they flagged the file it triggered an accidental DMCA notice, for which they seem to be apologizing.
Useful though it may be, it's very clearly against Dropbox's Terms of Service. That doesn't give them the right to issue takedown notices to other sites on copyright grounds, but let's separate, "evil for issuing fake takedown notices" (which they are), from "evil for wanting to prevent this kind of activity" (which is perfectly reasonable).
They're not running a filesharing service, that's not their business model, and they don't want to end up like Rapidshare or any of the N other filesharing services in legal hot water. I love Dropbox, and I would hate to see one of it's most useful features- public collaboration folders- shut down because some asshats can't obey the TOS and just use torrents instead. Dropbox should be trying to find a technical solution to block something like this, but if that's not possible, what can they do?
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Vote this article down - it's misleading flamebait in the extreme. In particular, it fails to mention that the software was designed to facilitate anonymous filesharing, which would most certainly be used for copyright infringement and illegal purposes. And, the whole thing goes against Dropbox's TOS, even if it isn't used for dubious file sharing purposes.
I'm with dropbox on this one. The idea of converting dropbox into some sort of filesharing/torrent service, for passing potentially illegal files around is not good.
I can see why Dropbox doesn't want to be linked to such a thing, when the big media people come a knocking, who do you think is going to end up getting sued?
And just because its open source doesn't make it right, or wrong, or change anything.
If they used real encryption they would have to host files over and over again. Encryption breaks file deduping. No way is dropbox going to do something like that, there is no advantage in it for them.
Sending a fake DMCA takedown is illegal, yes, but an e-mail that says "we deleted your file due to DMCA takedown notice we received" isn't a DMCA takedown notice. And apparently that e-mail just went out automatically any time they banned a file from someone's account. Apparently it never occurred to whoever designed their system that a file might be removed for anything other than copyright violation... or maybe the admin just didn't select the correct reason when he banned it.
It's already been shown that Dropbox's claims about security are mostly bogus. If Dropbox can Hand Over Your Files to the Feds If Asked then the encryption method they use to store files on their servers is meaningless since they have the private keys anyway.
Hi, I'm the person why wrote dropship. This thread is completely bogus, as there were no DMCA requests issued at all. They mailed me and asked me nicely to take the code down from github, which I did.
The DMCA confusion is because they stopped a file from being shared on their own service, which generated a silly mail that a DMCA request had been received from themselves and hence a file was taken down. The blogger confused this with a DMCA request (and corrected it afterwards, but it seems slashdot missed this).
So can we cut it with the flamebait title?