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Comment by wissler | Hacker News Reader

On the one hand, this was predictable. On the other, it is unethical by Dropbox. What they said was telling:

“It’s come to our attention that latest Boxopus features could be perceived as encouraging users to violate copyright using Dropbox.”

"Could be perceived"? An apple "could be perceived" as a hand grenade by a sufficiently insane person. Only a blatantly corrupt legal environment would use "could be perceived" as a standard for punishing someone. Of course, that's the kind of legal environment we live in.

Should Dropbox take the risk? As an industry leader who is greatly benefiting from "The System", it is their duty to take the proper moral stand. Otherwise they are clearly just part of the problem.

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I don't know that the apple analogy holds up. Yes, an apple could be perceived as a hand grenade by a crazy person, but a sane person could see how boxopus will likely be used for piracy.

And maybe that's just fine, but it's kind of drop box's house, their rules. It's like if you own a building and your new tenant, a computer repair store, decides to pivot to being a medical marijuana dispensary. Hey, it's legal-ish, but you can't really fault the landlord for kicking them out.

Plus, once you take 400 million, you're part of the system and you don't need to make yourself a bigger target than you already are.

"but a sane person could see how boxopus will likely be used for piracy."

And a sane person could see how a butter knife could be used for murder.

To be fair, Dropbox doesn't allow upload of any type of knife.

To be pedantic, Dropbox doesn't allow upload of any type of physical knife.

The most common use of a butter knife is not murder.

My most common use of torrents is not piracy.

Well, sure, but 'my' != 'the'.

each person should be judged individually. When you punish the whole group... that's just communism.

a minority view, I am sure.

This is what I was wondering about on a greater scale. Do you happen to have a link to recent statistics that show this is the case for torrent traffic in general?

I found two studies from 2010: one by a Princeton student[1] and one by the University of Ballarat (Australia) [2]. Both of then found that the vast majority of bittorrent traffic, not surprisingly, is illegal and both were heavily critiziced. I quote:

"...89.9 per cent of them were illegal and, of the remainder, 8.2 per cent was porn."[2]

"Overall, about one percent of the total files were categorized as "likely noninfringing."[1]

[1] http://arstechnica.com/business/2010/01/bittorrent-census-ab... [2] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/07/only-03-of-files-...

> it is their duty to take the proper moral stand. Otherwise they are clearly just part of the problem.

They are taking a moral stand. Their stance is they don't want to get involved with software which they believe is primarily going to be use for piracy. Their company, their decision.

Their behavior is unprincipled with respect to their customers. It is immoral. "Their company, their decision" is not a moral argument.

Gonzo Producer: Hey pizza guy, I want to use your pizza store to film a porno. It's completly legal!

Pizza Guy: No, I have legitimate customers here! You'll drive family customers away!

Gonzo Producer: You're behaving immorally! It's not illegal for me to film a porno, so you're morally bound to let me film in your restaurant, even if it will cause substantial economic damage to your business! You're oppressing my freedom of speech!

Forgive my language, but do you see how stupid your argument is?

Your argument is nonsense. You presume that the torrent feature implies something unsavory, akin to porn, when it's merely a means of copying from point A to point B efficiently.

"Forgive my language, but do you see how stupid your argument is?"

Actually you're embarrassing yourself, compounding your first foolish remark with this escalation.

> You presume that the torrent feature implies something unsavory

The beauty of this is that it is well within Dropbox's rights to determine what they deem savory and unsavory for their business, not you...

What a bizarre thing to say. No one has disputed Dropbox's legal rights here.

The question at issue is whether they are morally upstanding to make this decision or not. And guess what? It's my prerogative to state what I think on that topic, not yours, not Dropbox's.

I guess the only thing left is...build your own alternative to Dropbox?

"The question at issue is whether they are morally upstanding to make this decision or not."

A business does not operate in a "moral" way, unlike a human would. No matter how much you personify a business. They would want the public to perceieve them as being moral, but they are doing that for only one reason - PR, which to some coroprations, are intimately tied to their bottom line.

I have no doubt moral behaviour is a consequence of it being a good way to increase the bottomline, and is not a goal in of itself. The free documentary film "The Corporation" outlines this quite well, and worth watching.

I think if you did a poll you'd find people on either side of "is it moral to do good deeds motivated by recognition". Also, businesses may be largely sociopathic, but not completely.

Maybe Dropbox is not interested in being part of the "P2P against RIAA" fight.

Actually, no, I disagree, it is not the duty of a short-term technology industry leader to be an instrument of social change. They can do that if they want to, but there's no categorical imperative.

One might even cite Facebook as the counterexample, an organisation whose leader is explicitly and openly part of a systemic shift in expectations of privacy.

Dropbox is taking a moral stand. They are taking a stand against piracy. They choose not to be part of the problem.

Sure, Boxopus could be used for legal purposes, just as bittorrent could be used for legal purposes. But everyone on HN knows that the vast majority of bittorrent use is not for legal purposes. Visit any major torrent site. Look at the first 1000 torrents. Count the number of legal torrents. Checking the PirateBay, KickAssTorrents, and Demonoid, I count about 16 legitimate uses of bittorrent. The remaining 984 torents are ebooks, movies, software or games.

These rich corporations are de facto stewards of our political system. (That may not be the ideal way the political system should work, but that's how it does work, and the well-connected, well-funded fully exploit it).

And the problem here isn't piracy. It's freedom of speech and property rights. Might someone misuse their property? Sure. But that's no grounds for stifling them.

Dropbox is behaving in an immoral fashion. (For contrast, look at what Twitter's very morally upstanding behavior on a number of issues over the past few years).

Dropbox is behaving morally. They are choosing not to allow a product/service that they know will be overwhelmingly used for copyright violations. This is not theft, but it does cause meaningful and measurable economic harm to the owners and producers. Before you spout off about media company oppression, remember that the people most affected by piracy are the crews that work behind the scenes to make the movies and tv shows. The crews are the first people fired if movies and tv shows can't cover their budget.

Furthermore, freedom of speech is protection from government censorship of speech. Private persons do not have to let you say anything on their property. Private persons do not have to let you use their property. Dropbox is a private company. It does not have to let other people use its API, website, service, facilities, or employees.

If you want to use Boxopus some much, create your own Dropbox, from scratch. Then you can do whatever you want with it.

While I agree with your free market principles, I do not agree with your application in this mixed economy context. Dropbox is not exactly a private company. The larger the company, the more it tends to be a branch of our government (via insidious corporatist mechanisms), so your standing up for their "private property" rights is dangerously misplaced.

An even more extreme example would be the telecoms, which greatly benefit from government privilege and where individual competition is prohibited. Saying "build your own telecom from scratch, don't complain" is just very deranged given the context.

Further, even if you were correct that it was a truly private company, your defense on the grounds of property rights is misplaced. A torrent is merely a technical way of copying efficiently, it is not a copyright-violating tool. Whether you believe it is often used for that purpose is completely irrelevant. What is relevant is that there are users with legitimate needs for this service, and Dropbox is arbitrarily declaring it off limits because some other users might use it in a way they don't approve of. There is no moral principle that says punish Peter for what Paul might be doing; on the contrary, behaving that is viciously immoral behavior.

So, Dropbox is indeed behaving immorally.

Oh the noble pirate, Dropbox must throw themselves on their sword to be moral. You are way out on a ledge but your tinfoil hat fits well.

I'm not a pirate. I don't even use torrents myself. But your admission that you have no argument, implied by your fabrication in order to make an ad hominem attack, is noted.

Well I don't think it is ad hominen if the reference was metaphorical, but I could be wrong. Sorry I labeled you as pirate (god I hate that word now), but I thought that was implied. Dropbox has certain rights. Whether they spend capital on a moral crusade should be up to them. It's a freedom thing.

It's not implied.

No one has disputed their legal rights, nor is it a "moral crusade" to at least try to do the right thing. On the contrary, given that you have plenty of resources, then not doing the right thing is dishonorable. Dropbox's actions are dishonorable.

Is it your view that Twitter has "thrown themselves on their sword" when they went out of their way to defend the rights of their users against government subpoena? Or when they took a stand on software patents?

Twitter and Drop box can have independent "moral compasses". They don't have to have the same -just as you and I don't have to share the same. Not to imply that questioning subpoenas equates to questioning piracy. Piracy is not a right, while having protections against unreasonable searches is aright (depending on country, of course).

Well sure, they can have independent moral compasses, but they shouldn't. They both depend on a civilized society. Dropbox needs to uphold and defend the values of civilization (which don't include a paternalistic authoritarian monitoring system), not thwart them.

I disagree. Just because I could open a grocery store which found it morally repugnant to sell animal-derived products does not mean everyone should share the same values. People and firms should be able to do the same within the framework of law

Animal-derived products are not morally repugnant, and the framework of law is no substitute for having a good moral sense.

"Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal." --Martin Luther King, Jr.

>and the framework of law is no substitute for having a good moral sense.

Well, then, they're covered doubly. They are following moral sense and are also following the law. I.e. I do not see how taking this path breaks laws and I don't see their choice as being immoral.

W/re animal-derived products. You and I might feel that eating animal flesh is a-ok, morally speaking. Conversely I and others might feel otherwise -that's it's morally indefensible. (see animal rights activists, or "the sexual politics of meat", for example).

Dr. King used that phrase to make a point, he didn't say that to prove the legality of what Hitler did.

How you or others "feel" is not a moral argument. And you do not understand the point of Dr. King's quote.

Actually how people "feel" is about what makes up ALL of a moral argument. It's moral for you to waste an animals life when tofo rice and beans give you the same amino acids and proteins? It's moral for us to eat these things and spend a hundred times more for the chicken then for the rice? It's moral for us to do this when that money could be spent on a hundred meals for starving children?

Much like beauty, morality is in the eye of the beholder, it's what society accepts. There were groups which at one point thought it was morally acceptable to assault women if they were peasants, but not if they were royalty. Everyone at the time thought that was morally okay, since Kings chose their knights, and god chose the king. Sure some things will get a more broadly accepted morally wrong or right vote by people. (not many people today would say rape is okay for instance) but abortion, animal eating, stem cells and LBGT's are still accepted by some and wrong by others. It's called Freedom.

Dropbox is not the huge powerhouse of money that would be able to just act as if the law doesn't apply to them. They are scared that they will get in trouble, and the biggest reason for them to do this in my honest opinion is simple... Traffic, dropbox servers were acting up recently, right when boxopus got big, chances are they can't keep up the kind of traffic that torrents require.

Is it a shame that I can't use a legit tool to download me some open stuff? Yeah a bit. But, guess what. I found 5 open source dropbox clones within minutes of a google search. It really wasn't that hard.

If boxopus could have stayed, I promise I would have been getting a paid dropbox account. With dropbox not letting these guys continue, there's a good chance I'll invest my time in one of the open source projects. I really like debugging stuff anyways so it'll be fun.

TL;DR - Dropbox is a private company, I can take my money elsewhere if I want, or pick one of the many open source alternatives.

So in order to get unpirated stuff you go to the pirate bay to find it?

Humble Bundle, most Linux Distro's, Open Source Software, Public Domain Books, Articles, http://www.clearbits.net/ (legal open music), every site listed here http://gigaom.com/video/ten-sites-for-free-and-legal-torrent..., NASA Footage...

I could actually go on. Thanks for trying to show everyone how evil torrents are.

Great post. To add to the usefulness of the protocol, I use the BitTorrent protocol on the WAN to sync files with my own computers and those of family members via my own/our tracker, and also on the LAN when i have to move large files and repositories of information between computers (which i do often).

It is surprising to me, to say the least, that people on HN don't understand this protocol is extremely useful to hack with.

BS - dropbox is NOT taking a moral stand. They are under the control of corporate council in a highly visible silicon valley company.

Give me access to Drew Houston's home machines and I will likely be able to prove he has torrent software installed and content downloaded. Let's not be morons here - this is about corporate governance to appear responsible regardless of morals.

If Dropbox wanted to take an actual moral stand it would implement a system which would fingerprint the .avi and .mp4 files (as examples) stored by its users, compare them to torrent files it could download in an automated fashion And delete/block syncing of said fingerprinted files.

This is in no way a moral stand it's a legal circle jerk making sure VC funding credibility is retained.

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