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Comment by pyvek | Hacker News Reader

Yes, it looks like OP isn't presenting the whole story. The DMCA filing party would have to provide the URL (of the public/shared folder) containing the copyrighted material to dropbox for takedown. I don't think they can just request dropbox to scan private folders to check for copyrighted content.

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They'd have to provide the URL of some public folder containing the copyrighted material, but that's probably sufficient to get every identical file taken down including ones in private folders.

Yes it is sufficient and doable but the question is will dropbox do it? How will they even identify whether I own or have the license to use the files I have in my private folder. If I just keep my purchased ebooks in a dropbox (private) folder and a public folder (belonging to someone else) containing some of the same ebooks are flagged, why should I be affected?

If they don't want to meet the same fate as MegaUpload, Dropbox are certainly going to take down all copies.

In other words, you can't use Dropbox for any copyrighted content, even that which you own and are just storing there privately?

That doesn't even make sense... but then again, much of copyright law doesn't either.

MegaUpload's problem went far beyond the fact that they just didn't take down all copies of a file with a DMCA complaint against it.

Even better what if the copyright holder is lazy and keeps copies of the ebooks a dropbox folder. I would not be shocked to find this happening. How would dropbox distinguish between the two?

The guy shared a link for the file, which is the reason it got flagged. There is nothing pointing to Dropbox taking down matching private copies.

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