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Comment by dantiberian | Hacker News Reader

I've seen a lot of outrage about this on Twitter, what annoys me most is that these people who are outraged for the most part consider piracy to be acceptable. Then when a company tries to enforce copyright law and protect the rights of the content owners they go on a tirade that their personal privacy is being breached.

I know that the rights holders haven't been blameless in their history but piracy is still wrong and getting upset about people trying to stop it is wrong.

EDIT: I also think that Dropbox's method of detecting copyrighted files is a perfectly reasonable way of doing it. By now we all (should) know the rights we give up for the convenience we get when using consumer cloud services. I think Dropbox are well within their legal and moral rights to do this.

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Although I'm not one of the outraged, I think this sentence from the article talks about two very different situations:

> Only when a file is shared from user-to-user (or with the Internet at large) does the DMCA check system come into play.

Doing a DMCA takedown on a broadcast share with the whole internet? OK. Fine.

Doing it on a share with a specific other user? Not OK. Bad.

IANAL, but: There are limited exceptions such as fair use. For example if a teacher were sharing copyrighted work with a student or another teacher, that could be appropriate. I think it is inappropriate for Dropbox to prevent an appropriate share like this. Their ToS may allow them to do so, but I'm saying they ought not to do so. I think that's taking it too far.

I think your fair use argument is reasonable. Interestingly fair use for sheet music (as one example) in an educational context is far more limited than you might think [1]. There are a number of limited exceptions for sharing copyrighted materials with a student but all of them would involve transforming the sheet music by only sharing part of it. In this scenario this would change the hash of the file and the file blacklist wouldn't pick it up.

[1] http://copyright.lib.utexas.edu/musguid.html

If you want a proper laugh: re-share an "internal" rip from a private tracker on a public one without sufficient identifying meta-data, and watch some fool jump up and down because you've stolen his hard work without credit. His hard word of course being to steal someone else's hard work... To some (many?) everything they do is fair, and everything they don't like isn't (even if what they don't like is exactly what they do themselves).

Not that I would know anything about obtaining copyright protected materials in that manner, of course. A friend told me about it, honest...

I'm very strongly anti-pirate and very strongly anti-dropboox snooping. It's quite possible to be both.

Are you strongly against dropbox hashing files you have shared and comparing them against a known blacklist?

Yes. That's snooping. They're actively looking at what I store with them.

A Dropbox employee looking through your files for filenames with DVDRIP would be actively looking. Hashing a file and comparing it to a blacklist is automated scanning. I think a blacklist is a perfectly reasonable solution to this problem and is as minimally invasive as possible. How would you approach this problem differently?

Snooping doesn't become not-snooping when software does it instead of a human. Ask the NSA.

How would I deal with it? To me it's clearly none of Dropbox's business and they shouldn't be doing this in any way, shape, or form.

"it's clearly none of Dropbox's business"

Actually, it's a core piece of Dropbox's business. One of the ways they save on storage is by comparing hashes of files (or even parts of files - how many bits of any two JPG or DOC files are identical?) being stored and, if identical, only store one copy of the file. That and they explain in plain english that they're allowed to do that. That they explicitly say they do as much in their TOS puts the onus on the user to not store anything they're concerned about the privacy of on Dropbox's servers.

Would you please zip content of your hard-drive and uploaded it on dropbox? Also give me password from your gmail. I want to check if there is no illegal copy of my work in there.

No one is reading people's hard drives or gmail. They are comparing shared files, on their servers, against a hash of commonly pirated files. You are exhibiting the behavior parent comment was complaining about.

Who says I would be reading it? I will just compare all that content with my hash checker, and delete all illegal stuff. Do not worry I use ultra strong 8 bit hash :-)

It is user who has to deal with blocking, false positives and other negative externalities of this. Copyright holders are just passing on their costs to entire society.

What costs? That you can't share pirated movies over dropbox? Big deal.

Funny speaking about externalities on copyright. The entire purpose is to get rid of externalities.

It's wrong? Who says? Why? Because it is illegal? Was slavery OK when it was legal? Is capital punishment? Smoking pot?

If you mean we shouldn't do it because it is illegal, that's fine, although personally I don't find that a compelling reason. I think some people here think maybe the copyright laws should be different then they are. Said that way, it isn't unreasonable opinion, compared to "OMG! You think piracy is acceptable!" There's a better level of conversation here: What do they think should be different? Why? Why do you think its wrong? What does wrong even mean in this case?

Care to enlighten us?

Yes, it's wrong. If the creators wanted people to share their work for free, they could allow it. Furthermore, it's their server, they can forbid it if they want, even if it was legal.

Of course, I see now. It's wrong. Houshalter says. I'm genuinely confused about the pot thing. Can you clear that one up for me, too?

One could just as easily make a stupid comment about how it's not wrong for them to come into your house and steal your things. Who said property rights are right? Who says? Why? Because it is illegal? Why do you think its wrong? What does wrong even mean in this case? Care to enlighten us?

Sure, we can debate the merits of intellectual property or property rights or whatever, but it's not really relevant to the parent comment, you are just picking a fight. Few think it's ok for people to just take things that aren't theirs, and few think stealing music is ok either.

Yes, I was being flippant. That's not constructive and I apologize. However, I think there is an interested discussion to be had about property rights, just like intellectual property rights. I'd want to know the history of property rights. How did we get here? What are our cultural goals and how to property rights help (or fail) to achieve them? What are the limits? Do we think it is a moral question? That is, is it a question of right and wrong? It might be obvious that people shouldn't be able to come and take your stuff, but what about eminant domain and criminal asset forfeiture in the US? What about corporate property rights? I'm thinking about water privatization and the popular uprising in Bolivia, for example. Or (back to intellectual property) the rights of corporations to patent otherwise protect chemicals and genes found in nature, also called piracy by some, biopiracy. Or extending copyright on things destined for the public domain (copyright extension acts).

> it's not really relevant to the parent comment ... and few think stealing music is ok either.

Maybe I misunderstood the parent comment, but wasn't the poster complaining that so many people on twitter outraged about Dropbox's behavior think privacy is acceptable?

I think a lot of people are unhappy with the current intellectual property law and they feel powerless to influence it. The kind of frustrations that produces the GPL and Creative Commons, although not all of us have the vision, leadership or influence of a Stallman or a Lessig. I suspect some current attitudes about piracy are related to those frustrations. I also think a debate about piracy -- rather than just shouting "It's wrong." -- can be very profitable. I'm reading Adrian John's history of Piracy (highly recommended). From the Introduction:

"Those who were called pirates almost never [took the charaterization at face value]: they always repudiated the label as inaccurate and unjust. The point is that when they did so, they often triggered debates that threw light on major structural issues and had major consequences as a result. We can profit by focusing on precisely these contests -- and the more prolonged, variegated, and ferocious they were, the better. They strained relations between creativity and commercial life, and at critical moments caused them to be reconstituted."

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