And you've completely missed the point of this entire thread, congratulations :)

No, I specifically meant what I typed - the article is written in the way that you are intended to be left feeling as if Dropbox is deliberately doing something morally, ethically and socially unacceptable, and that they have just started doing it. The article writer and subjects mentioned within it are outraged that Dropbox is doing what they are doing, regardless of the fact that an average person wouldn't have any issues with what Dropbox are doing in this instance.

Its the article writers and subjects which have the forced outrage, because forced indifference doesn't cause page clicks.

New hash, no *immediate* take down, but be prepared to be on the receiving end of one, which I would consider mildly worse than having Dropbox say "nope" before the lawyers get involved.

Its only if they have received take down notices for that specific item with that specific cryptographic hash before - if the item you are sharing has never been the subject of a take down request, then you are free to share it, there is no proactive policing going on.

What 3 year old do you know that played a video game alone in their room?

Because that's the age range I'm talking about - babies to early primary school age are becoming more and more "parented" by the devices shoved in-front of them, which invariably is a video playback of "Dora the Explorer" or the "Telly Tubbies" rather than social interaction with their parents, because those parents still want the life style they had prior to having the children.

The first real social interaction these children get is when they are shoved together with other children of the same age, which invariably have had the same stuff shoved on them, which compounds the issue because these children are now late in developing their social skills.

Good for you, but you wouldn't have fallen foul of this issue anyway because you wouldn't be linking your files publicly.

But this isn't new, its been going on since Dropbox implemented their DCMA violation checking system a few years ago, and you can see *why* they are doing it.

Lets clarify a few things for those that aren't going to RTFA - this isn't for private shared folders, or for folders within your own Dropbox. This is for when you create *public* links, by either using the "Shared Links" facility or when you create a public link from the old style Public folder.

Thats it. The files Dropbox is including in these scans are *publicly linked* to - and they are fair game if Dropbox wants to stay ahead of the legal system on this front. Dropbox has no idea that you only intend to share it with yourself, or one other person, and there is no mechanism by which you can ensure that yourself anyway.

Yet again its forced outrage against basically something which is common sense - if the file has been taken down before, its going to be again, and the less man power Dropbox expends while handling DCMA requests the better for them as a company.

The number of people I have seen who just plonk their kid down in front of the TV and stick the kids network on has risen dramatically in the past decade - and now you even see it when out in public, the number of toddler aged children in push chairs with an iPhone or iPad (or equivilent) mounted on a stand attached to the push chair continuously playing some kids show or other...

Interacting with children seems to be a huge issue these days, one most parents cant be bothered with.

I'm sure people would disagree with you that standing at a urinal in a public toilet should still be considered "private", and what you do there should not be able to be recorded by the person stood next to you and replayed for their enjoyment.

In the same way that Mozilla cannot "own" Firefox?

Actually gnasher is correct - you have no *right* to the source code, you only have a *right* to either insist they abide by the licence terms or be in violation of copyright, and if its the latter then you need someone whose copyright is being violated to bring suit against them as no one else can do it in their stead.

Well, look at you, who thinks checking and bagging your groceries is beneath you.

I bet you also yearn for the days when you didn't even have to walk the aisles to get the groceries and take them to the till point!

No it didn't, England is still a country today.

Then your post makes even less sense.

The AWS keys referred to in the article are for the storage accounts et al, so theres no "registration" or "validation" of an application going on, you just sign up to AWS, create a bucket for S3 or whatever, and supply the connection credentials to the app.

And that is something that the end user most definitely should be doing.

How about how Google are currently using unfair competition to destroy Dropbox and other major cloud syncing solutions...?