Dropbox's New Policy of Scanning Files For DMCA Issues

Posted by samzenpus on Monday March 31, 2014 @12:02AM from the lets-see-what-you-have-there dept.

Advocatus Diaboli (1627651) writes "This weekend a small corner of the Internet exploded with concern that Dropbox was going too far, actually scanning users' private and directly peer-shared files for potential copyright issues. What's actually going on is a little more complicated than that, but shows that sharing a file on Dropbox isn't always the same as sharing that file directly from your hard drive over something like e-mail or instant messenger. The whole kerfuffle started yesterday evening, when one Darrell Whitelaw tweeted a picture of an error he received when trying to share a link to a Dropbox file with a friend via IM. The Dropbox web page warned him and his friend that 'certain files in this folder can't be shared due to a takedown request in accordance with the DMCA.'"

2 of 243 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

Re:Later Dropbox! by noblebeast · 2014-03-31 00:36 · Score: 5, Interesting

MEGA is looking like a better alternative every day. End-to-end encryption, and 50GB(!) free storage.

--
Its not so bad as long as you can keep the fear from your mind.
Re:Much, Much Later by jimbo · 2014-03-31 06:00 · Score: 5, Interesting

I've used EncFS and BoxCryptor with Dropbox from day one and 'd do that with any cloud storage solution, no matter what they claim it is irrelevant. It is my data, by choice I'm retaining the responsibility for it's safety/security.
I'll continue to use Dropbox because I never trusted them and made sure I didn't have to.