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Dropbox deletes Rick and Morty creators account for secret TOS violation

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Re: Dropbox deletes Rick and Morty creators account for secret TOS violation

#141

This is an inevitable consequence from the push to make cloud companies responsible for the content they host. Analyzing all of it can only be automated; automation will deliver weird false positives.

Amazing that the Internet culture that vehemently opposed DRM and created things like bit torrent so quickly lined up behind algorithmic content moderation.

I think that internet (that opposed drm) and this one are very different. The anti drm movement was more of a popular movement and this one is a reaction by large corporations to new legal regulations (or threats of more regulations). It’s hard to even think of those as the same “culture”

Re: Dropbox deletes Rick and Morty creators account for secret TOS violation

#142
post #104

hmmm... I largely use https://github.com/bailey27/cppcryptfs with dropbox? This would essentially eliminate any possibility of violating any terms of service as far as I can tell? I'm not too comfortable putting any files on dropbox without some sort of encryption fwiw, I've found that cppcryptfs is one of the better implementations of that sort though most (if not all) use the same library which seems to choke on ce…

And I bet doing that would also avoid what happened here -- account suspension for some unknown reason, but likely content related. If your content is encrypted, they can't drop you over it.

Of course at that point you're not using all of dropbox's features, and some other rsync-style solution may well be cheaper.

Re: Dropbox deletes Rick and Morty creators account for secret TOS violation

#143
post #24

If he uses it for work, and clearly, most shared links he creates are of copyrighted media content, how would this work in practice? Does Google Drive/Dropbox have some flag for "creator" accounts?

Obviously they said so in TOS, but it's pretty rare to get terminated due to copyrighted material alone.

At least not until you mass-share (maybe the case here?) them.

Re: Dropbox deletes Rick and Morty creators account for secret TOS violation

#144
> secret TOS violation

This is unfortunately a legal issue and no company big enough to have good lawyers will ever want to tell a customer why they're being banned as it exposes them to too much legal risk.

If there's a solution to this, it's probably to give companies some sort of protection from legal action resulting from incorrect application of their TOS. That's far from ideal itself, but it would at least remove some of the downside to honesty from companies on this sort of issue.

I can't blame Dropbox (or any other company who does this) given the potential downsides they face.

Re: Dropbox deletes Rick and Morty creators account for secret TOS violation

#146

Sounds like an opportunity for a new company that abstracts away the actual different cloud providers, provides redundancy, and provides a security abstraction layer that prevents cloud hosts from knowing what their segments of files are for.

And when that service is abused for piracy, CP, and other illegal files; it will start the ball rolling that inevitably drags it down legally to the level that DropBox is at.

Re: Dropbox deletes Rick and Morty creators account for secret TOS violation

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, "would be super useful" be "would have helped me". Maybe those have different meanings to you? They mean more or less the same to me?

One is an objective statement of the world, the other is a subjective statement about you personally. If these things mean the same to you, you're not parsing the English correctly, which points to a larger comprehension issue that further explains why you didn't get the original sarcasm.

No post body was provided.

Re: Dropbox deletes Rick and Morty creators account for secret TOS violation

#148
post #24

If he uses it for work, and clearly, most shared links he creates are of copyrighted media content, how would this work in practice? Does Google Drive/Dropbox have some flag for "creator" accounts?

Copyright is automatic, most things that most people create are copyrighted media content.

The problem is that we've ended up with a situation where copyright is automatically:

1. Assumed to be owned by media-corporations

2. Assumed to be wilfully violated by users

3. Assumed to be that deletion is the correct resolution

4. Assumed the USA to be the jurisdiction of the copyright holder and user

All of these assumptions should be challenged. This isn't a technical challenge, it's a legal one.

Special treatment for VIPs isn't the answer.

Re: Dropbox deletes Rick and Morty creators account for secret TOS violation

#149
post #58

Isn't it pointless to discuss this without knowing more about the communications that happened?

Not really. It’s unacceptable for Dropbox to know/inspect what content you’re storing, scan it for anything without you actively requesting they do so, and certainly to delete it.

This behaviour and any terms of service that allow it should be illegal. The fact that it goes on constantly is a scandal.

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