Hacker News Reader

Comment by aimatt | Hacker News Reader

Oh man, Dropbox is really losing it's luster for me. First trying to get rid of the Public folder and now blocking third party apps. It's really too bad all of the hard work put into Boxopus has to go to waste. They won't even have profit to offset their beta testing bandwidth usage. I was really looking forward to having this product at my disposal.

View on HN

Dropbox isn't blocking third-party apps, they blocked one particular third-party app which was aggressively attempting to pin a giant 'hey, come sue me' target on their back.

Both smart and user-friendly, for the subset of users who use Dropbox for things other than piracy.

Someone chanting that "it's Dropbox's API and they can do what they want" in 5, 4, 3, 2...

Well... yeah?

The presumption behind the chant is that what is legal is also moral, but that's clearly not the case, particularly in our ever more corrupt legal environment.

No, the presumption is that it's their API and they can do what they want. It's obviously a business decision. I'm pretty sure Dropbox didn't say "We hate torrenters" or "We want to turn away potential customers". They said "We see a liability and want to mitigate it to protect our business".

I don't see how that can be portrayed as "immoral".

The subject is "should Dropbox block the API" not "can Dropbox block the API."

And yes, the saw liability and wanted to mitigate it -- at the expense of moral principle.

I still don't think you've done any work to show that it's immoral for Dropbox to do this. Even if it weren't in their business interests, I don't think you've done the work to convince me that there is a moral issue at stake.

That's because I was already doing that work in a different comment and don't want to repeat myself. Feel free to address my remarks there.

I'm not saying it's not a complicated moral issue, but in my judgement it's far simpler when you're talking about big corporations with a lot of money and power. If a tiny business was too scared to take the proper stand, that would be one thing, but the big mega-corp ought to at least try to do the right thing, and then only back down when there are serious legal issues they can't get across (see Twitter vs. the US government regarding releasing user information).

... Dropbox is a megacorp? They have something like 100 employees.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com