What interests me is the promotion of these jailbreaks as a good thing. It's an exploit, after all. That allows the attacker to completely root your device, often just by visiting a website. It's not only limited to iOS either, this is rampant in Android too. The only current devices with no known exploits are Windows Phone 7 based, which is very telling.
They actually police that the advertisers who get to do that own the content. You cannot just upload anything you want and start making money from it. MegaUpload was exactly the opposite.
No you won't be hit with trademark infringement lawsuit. You're not claiming "Walt Disney's Steamboat Willy" as your own product or company, you're only allowing user to download it. That's fair use. Likewise, companies are allowed to use their competitors names when doing product comparisons or other things like that (if they're honest). You just aren't allowed to claim it as your own product.
That's not copyright infringement, it's trademark issue. And trademarks are a good thing to avoid someone taking your name and using it to confuse people. Note that generally trademarks also only apply to the same industry.
People aren't as stupid as you think. Almost everyone knows about copyright laws. And regardless, not knowing about laws doesn't remove your liability. I can't kill or rape someone and say that I didn't know such laws existed.
It's not a matter of expecting them to police content or users, it's a matter of MegaUpload's intentions. The site was clearly profiting from piracy. Likewise, not all hosting companies are going to be illegal just because police bust a hosting company that clearly is profiting from illegal content, for example by naming themselves "Child Porn Hosting" or "Warez ISP" or where it can be proofed that the company is actively acting as such. In this case MegaUpload's internal emails also showed they were fully aware of this. On top of that they went around DMCA laws by not actually deleting the files. If other user uploaded the same file, it was not actually uploaded again but was only given private url. When DMCA notice came, only the specific URL was disabled and the infringing content was still available at any other URL. Then there is still the whole matter of directly profiting from it.
Do you want link to any case where **AA sued someone for "stealing idea"? And no, actual movie/song/whatever isn't an idea, it's a product. I have never heard of anyone getting sued for copyright infringement by making original content.
But Dropbox doesn't try to profit from allowing users to download copyrighted material. Nor do they pay out to affiliates to upload popular content which almost always is pirated files. There's a major difference. And intent *does* count in court.
You're correct, and there's big difference between RapidShare and the likes of Dropbox. MegaUpload, RapidShare etc is clearly profiting from copyrighted content. They pay users to upload popular files, and in 99% of cases it is pirated content. In turn they profit when users want to access those files. It's a huge "industry", and there will most likely be many more arrests when the list of affiliates that directly made money by uploading copyrighted content without permission goes public.
Dropbox doesn't have any such incentive for users, and they're free to download from. It's the uploader that pays for file upload space just like with web hosting, and he (nor Dropbox) cannot make money by uploading pirated content.
That is moot point, especially if you try to rely on them for business purposes. Yes, it's good that you can take out your data, but what do you do when they discontinue their service? At least desktop apps continue working. It's kind of funny that Slashdotters in general dislike DRM, and online services are basically the worst kind of DRM.
Usually there really isn't any good warning ahead in time. For example Microsoft gives exact end of support dates for almost all of their products and it's usually years. With Google it's just a few months. Not all of Google's services are free either, and since they most often don't release the source code, you are basically locked to their services.
This is why it's ridiculous to rely on cloud services. That is what ultimately all of Google's services are. On top of that most of them are closed source too, so you're just out of luck when Google decides to kill them off. And judging by the amount of services they're quickly killed it probably isn't going to change. This is why desktop software is still much more reliable than online services, and I'm not going to change something like Microsoft Office to Google Docs.
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What interests me is the promotion of these jailbreaks as a good thing. It's an exploit, after all. That allows the attacker to completely root your device, often just by visiting a website. It's not only limited to iOS either, this is rampant in Android too. The only current devices with no known exploits are Windows Phone 7 based, which is very telling.
They actually police that the advertisers who get to do that own the content. You cannot just upload anything you want and start making money from it. MegaUpload was exactly the opposite.
You have access to the code and know how it would behave in such a case?
Yes, it's called disassembling. Not that I think Dropbox behaves like that, though.
No you won't be hit with trademark infringement lawsuit. You're not claiming "Walt Disney's Steamboat Willy" as your own product or company, you're only allowing user to download it. That's fair use. Likewise, companies are allowed to use their competitors names when doing product comparisons or other things like that (if they're honest). You just aren't allowed to claim it as your own product.
Don't you think its a little bit abusive to not allow the original content creators and artists to determine themselves the terms of the trade?
That's not copyright infringement, it's trademark issue. And trademarks are a good thing to avoid someone taking your name and using it to confuse people. Note that generally trademarks also only apply to the same industry.
People aren't as stupid as you think. Almost everyone knows about copyright laws. And regardless, not knowing about laws doesn't remove your liability. I can't kill or rape someone and say that I didn't know such laws existed.
It's not a matter of expecting them to police content or users, it's a matter of MegaUpload's intentions. The site was clearly profiting from piracy. Likewise, not all hosting companies are going to be illegal just because police bust a hosting company that clearly is profiting from illegal content, for example by naming themselves "Child Porn Hosting" or "Warez ISP" or where it can be proofed that the company is actively acting as such. In this case MegaUpload's internal emails also showed they were fully aware of this. On top of that they went around DMCA laws by not actually deleting the files. If other user uploaded the same file, it was not actually uploaded again but was only given private url. When DMCA notice came, only the specific URL was disabled and the infringing content was still available at any other URL. Then there is still the whole matter of directly profiting from it.
Do you want link to any case where **AA sued someone for "stealing idea"? And no, actual movie/song/whatever isn't an idea, it's a product. I have never heard of anyone getting sued for copyright infringement by making original content.
It's clear to everyone what is being meant, and you should stop nit-picking.
But Dropbox doesn't try to profit from allowing users to download copyrighted material. Nor do they pay out to affiliates to upload popular content which almost always is pirated files. There's a major difference. And intent *does* count in court.
You're correct, and there's big difference between RapidShare and the likes of Dropbox. MegaUpload, RapidShare etc is clearly profiting from copyrighted content. They pay users to upload popular files, and in 99% of cases it is pirated content. In turn they profit when users want to access those files. It's a huge "industry", and there will most likely be many more arrests when the list of affiliates that directly made money by uploading copyrighted content without permission goes public.
Dropbox doesn't have any such incentive for users, and they're free to download from. It's the uploader that pays for file upload space just like with web hosting, and he (nor Dropbox) cannot make money by uploading pirated content.
That is moot point, especially if you try to rely on them for business purposes. Yes, it's good that you can take out your data, but what do you do when they discontinue their service? At least desktop apps continue working. It's kind of funny that Slashdotters in general dislike DRM, and online services are basically the worst kind of DRM.
Usually there really isn't any good warning ahead in time. For example Microsoft gives exact end of support dates for almost all of their products and it's usually years. With Google it's just a few months. Not all of Google's services are free either, and since they most often don't release the source code, you are basically locked to their services.
This is why it's ridiculous to rely on cloud services. That is what ultimately all of Google's services are. On top of that most of them are closed source too, so you're just out of luck when Google decides to kill them off. And judging by the amount of services they're quickly killed it probably isn't going to change. This is why desktop software is still much more reliable than online services, and I'm not going to change something like Microsoft Office to Google Docs.