Using Dropbox as a Host for Static Websites. | Hacker News Reader

Using Dropbox as a Host for Static Websites.

andothernoise.blogspot.com

28 pointsalexandros16 comments

For a less TOS breaking solution, you could set up a dropbox client on your server and let it refresh your web content automatically. You're hosting it yourself, but you still get the benefit of no file transferring necessary.

I might be wrong, but this probably violates the terms of service if you're serving pages to more than a few visitors.

Yeah, using DropBox as a faux-CDN is a bad idea. To quote their terms:

> By placing Your Files in your public folder, you hereby grant all other Dropbox users and the public a non-exclusive, non-commercial, worldwide, royalty-free, sublicensable, perpetual and irrevocable right and license to use and exploit Your Files in your public folder

But having your DropBox "repository" as your web root seems pretty slick.

While that sounds perfectly reasonable to me, I wonder if it's that enforceable? That sounds like the public domain to me. Can a company declare "by doing X on our system, you hereby release your IP into the public domain?"

Sure they can. And you then have the choice NOT to use it.

Please see: http://mattmaroon.com/2009/05/01/hacker-news-disease/

I'm sorry, but what the hell does that have to do with my comment that a company can make you agree to licencing terms to use their product?

I read the question as being: is it legally enforceable for a company to have in their TOS that you release your IP into the public domain if you do X on their platform?

Are you an IP attorney or in any way qualified to answer that question? Matt's post was about people on HN answering questions that they are in no way qualified to answer, just because they're intelligent in some other unrelated area. Your post seemed like a perfect example.

I would say you could easily draw a paralell between this and companies including GPL software (and their ilk) and such into products, who are then forced to comply with the licencing terms and make entire source codes available.

Not necissarily. You can't write something into a contract that's not legal and still have that clause be enforceable. Stuff that's not legally enforceable is written into contracts all of the time. The question was whether or not this is one such clause, and the point of this sub-thread was that none of us seem to actually know the answer to that.

I think you're missing the point.

This isn't really news:

http://wiki.getdropbox.com/TipsAndTricks/HostWebsites

Dropbox itself has been suggesting you do this since at least mid-march, if not earlier. I wouldn't use it for your business' website, but it would probably be great for sharing information/photos/videos amongst friends.

A more interesting idea is mentioned here:

http://wiki.getdropbox.com/TipsAndTricks/WebPublishingSoluti...

This basically suggests using Dropbox to manage publishing and basic version control of a web application's source code. I will definitely be using this as soon as selective synching is enabled (hopefully soon - hint hint).

I don't know if they still do this but in the past dropbox did close down public transfers for people who overused or misused it (probably more a bandwidth issue such as sharing large videos).

I don't want to get into the details (for obvious reasons) but we are quite lenient about public link usage! We're mostly interested in cutting off the potentially expensive long tail, which can get very, very long.

I set my homepage to TiddlyWiki that's stored on Dropbox via a file:// link. The two are a fairly powerful and convenient combo.

I'm guessing (as with Amazon S3) it's not possible to host a root file - hence http://dl.dropbox.com/xxxx/whatever won't work.

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