Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Dropbox Attempts To Kill Open Source Project

razorfast.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 323 posts

Re: Dropbox Attempts To Kill Open Source Project

#141

Post by mrud »

jk8 wrote: post #134
dhouston wrote: post #106

drew from dropbox here. i hope you guys can give us the benefit of the doubt: when something pops up that encourages people to turn dropbox into the next rapidshare or equivalent (the title on HN was suggesting it could be the successor to torrents), you can imagine how that could ruin the service for everyone -- illegal file sharing has never been permitted and we take great pains to keep it off of dropbox. the inte…

Any news on fixing the exploit? Is the option being considered by dropbox?

> we've fixed the deduplication behavior serverside to prevent "injection" of files you don't actually have, for a variety of reasons.)

Already done.

Re: Dropbox Attempts To Kill Open Source Project

#142

Post by kelnos »

sorbus wrote: post #97
ceejayoz wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, they tried to kill an open source product, whose purpose was to facillitate illegal file sharing over DropBox. Where are you getting that information? My understanding it that its purpose was explicitly to facilitate legal file sharing over DropBox - Linux ISOs, for example.

Linux ISOs are always the example people come up with when they're defending protocols and methods which are primarily used for illegal purposes. The original post for DropShip gave, as an example, the trailer for a movie. Not the movie itself, but the trailer. That's the equivalent of saying "I've developed this great way to share files, such as videos, but am not going to explicitly say that it could be used for pi…

And hell, movie trailers are copyrighted too, and I assume aren't licensed for arbitrary distribution. So posting/sharing a trailer using DropShip is likely copyright infringement too.

Re: Dropbox Attempts To Kill Open Source Project

#143

Post by atacrawl »

random42 wrote: post #123
dhouston wrote: post #106

drew from dropbox here. i hope you guys can give us the benefit of the doubt: when something pops up that encourages people to turn dropbox into the next rapidshare or equivalent (the title on HN was suggesting it could be the successor to torrents), you can imagine how that could ruin the service for everyone -- illegal file sharing has never been permitted and we take great pains to keep it off of dropbox. the inte…

> illegal file sharing has never been permitted and we take great pains to keep it off of dropbox. Which is great, except you are punishing the crime, before it even occurred. Remember use of torrents are not illegal per se, sharing files which you do not copyright of, and piracy is. > there were no legal threats or any other shenanigans to the author or people hosting. (EDIT - No applicable. Read Drew's edit.) DMCA…

Which is great, except you are punishing the crime, before it even occurred.

This is pretty disingenuous. You really think their assumption that Dropship would quickly turn Dropbox into an illegal file sharing haven is an unrealistic grasping of straws?

Re: Dropbox Attempts To Kill Open Source Project

#144

Post by snorkel »

arashf wrote: post #21

This is Arash from Dropbox. We removed the ability to share the project source code because it enables communications with our servers in a manner that is a violation of our Terms of Service. By our TOS, we reserve the right to terminate the account of users in this case. However, we chose to remove access to the file instead of terminating the account of the user. We recently built a tool that allows us to ban links…

Pimp slapping developers works well for Facebook and Apple so why you miss out on all that fun, right? Next time don't take the personal touch and email them personally. Instead wait for their app to gain a following then suddenly ban them and let them cry like bitches. Then send them a form letter saying their account was banned for violating the new ToS you haven't even posted yet, and by the way this communication is considered a national security secret so they can't talk about it to anyone including their spouse. That's big pimping. Then sign the email with "You've been Dropboxed, bitch!" That'd be your tag line. You're my hero.

Re: Dropbox Attempts To Kill Open Source Project

#145

Post by dhouston »

TheAmazingIdiot wrote: post #132
dhouston wrote: post #106

drew from dropbox here. i hope you guys can give us the benefit of the doubt: when something pops up that encourages people to turn dropbox into the next rapidshare or equivalent (the title on HN was suggesting it could be the successor to torrents), you can imagine how that could ruin the service for everyone -- illegal file sharing has never been permitted and we take great pains to keep it off of dropbox. the inte…

Regardless, I can completely understand the actions of staying away from Rapidshare (read the full comment for a day pass of $5, or wait 30 seconds). However, pissing off the constituency that originally promoted your service isn't exactly #1 in your marketing plan. I'm not well known, but many who reside here are. Scaring off hackers just seems wrong, being Hacker News and all.

i can promise you we're not trying to piss off the HN audience, but sometimes we manage to anyway :)

Re: Dropbox Attempts To Kill Open Source Project

#146

Post by nokcha »

random42 wrote: post #123
dhouston wrote: post #106

drew from dropbox here. i hope you guys can give us the benefit of the doubt: when something pops up that encourages people to turn dropbox into the next rapidshare or equivalent (the title on HN was suggesting it could be the successor to torrents), you can imagine how that could ruin the service for everyone -- illegal file sharing has never been permitted and we take great pains to keep it off of dropbox. the inte…

> illegal file sharing has never been permitted and we take great pains to keep it off of dropbox. Which is great, except you are punishing the crime, before it even occurred. Remember use of torrents are not illegal per se, sharing files which you do not copyright of, and piracy is. > there were no legal threats or any other shenanigans to the author or people hosting. (EDIT - No applicable. Read Drew's edit.) DMCA…

>DMCA takedown notice is a legal threat.

I think Drew was mistaken when he called it a "takedown notice". That term has a specific meaning, and judging from the linked article, what DropBox actually sent to the OP was not a takedown notice. Instead, it was just a message saying that DropBox had received such a notice from a third party and consequently disabled access to the allegedly infringing file.

Re: Dropbox Attempts To Kill Open Source Project

#147

Post by sycren »

dhouston wrote: post #106

drew from dropbox here. i hope you guys can give us the benefit of the doubt: when something pops up that encourages people to turn dropbox into the next rapidshare or equivalent (the title on HN was suggesting it could be the successor to torrents), you can imagine how that could ruin the service for everyone -- illegal file sharing has never been permitted and we take great pains to keep it off of dropbox. the inte…

Out of interest, how do you plan to stop people using dropbox like rapidshare? It would be easy for one to upload a file divided into multiple rar files and distribute them to different dropbox accounts. The only way you would be able to block this is watching for a large amount of downloads of a particular file and finding out the context of the file which may prove impossible (and possibly illegal).

In terms of the software, it is unlikely that the general user will use it without some technical skill.

Re: Dropbox Attempts To Kill Open Source Project

#148

Post by gergles »

tptacek wrote: post #100
knowtheory wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that the unjustified and unilateral removal of code from someone else's access or threatening anyone with legal action is ever an acceptable mistake, let alone "trivial". The law is not a toy, and it's not supposed to be wielded casually. The DCMA is certainly not treated with the respect it is supposed to afford citizens, and this is just another example of that.

We disagree. The mechanism for getting Github to take down code is the DMCA request; it's what you use when someone at Github is hosting code that they didn't own that you'd like removed and you feel you have some grounds to have removed. It was a mistake for them to use a DMCA request here, because the code was MIT-licensed and thus even the author can no longer ask for it to be taken down. But nobody paid legal fee…

No, it isn't used for "some grounds", it's used for content (in this case, code) that directly violates your copyright, period. The DMCA process is very clear, and it isn't for "I don't like $content".

Abuse of the DMCA is already dramatically overblown, and the cavalier attitude of "oh well, deal with it" is a significant part of the problem.

Re: Dropbox Attempts To Kill Open Source Project

#149

Post by kunjaan »

arashf wrote: post #138
marshray wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Help me, I'm trying to get my head around this. You developed a file sharing system that allows anyone to obtain the full contents of a file by simply knowing its hash? Then when developers make tools to allow using this for simple cross-account file transfer you send DMCA takedown notices, claiming you are the rightful copyright holder of their code, to places like GitHub? You seem to equate other file transfer serv…

No DMCA takedown requests were sent to GitHub. We simply nicely asked the author of Dropship to take down the link and he fully understood our position and took the code down. The only erroneous use of DMCA was when we attempted to take down the link on Dropbox, which was an entirely honest mistake.

"He requested that I not only remove the archive from Dropbox but delete my posts on Hacker News, which at that point included the fake DMCA takedown."

What you tried to do there is censor and resorted to fake legal repercussions. You can brush it aside saying that it was a mistake but it is still uncool for a corporation to do that to an individual.

Re: Dropbox Attempts To Kill Open Source Project

#150

Post by gergles »

mrud wrote: post #141
jk8 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any news on fixing the exploit? Is the option being considered by dropbox?

> we've fixed the deduplication behavior serverside to prevent "injection" of files you don't actually have, for a variety of reasons.) Already done.

Doesn't seem to be done, as I just used the code in question to get the example trailer and I did not have the file in advance.
Post reply on HN