The new Dropbox TOS reads, starting with 1st of July 2011:
1) “We sometimes need your permission to do what you ask us to do with your stuff (for example, hosting, making public, or sharing your files).“
False. There should not be any “we” implied. “We” is the service itself, not some humans asking for your permission and then passing it to the “Service”. Imagine Microsoft asking for your permission to translate the movements of your mouse into GUI actions.
2) “By submitting your stuff to the Services, you grant us (and those we work with to provide the Services) worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable rights to use, copy, distribute, prepare derivative works (such as translations or format conversions) of, perform, or publicly display that stuff to the extent we think it necessary for the Service.“
A short note here: where was this point when I started using Dropbox, last year? What you see here is plainly illegal: there is no automatic sub-licensing shit these guys dream of.
This paragraph says that whatever I’ve put in Dropbox servers, now it already belongs to the public.
On a second thought, why would you consider there’s something you think it’s “necessary for the Service” without me thinking the same?
3) “You must ensure you have the rights you need to grant us that permission.“
What? I don’t! Say I have already stored enterprise secrets in my Dropbox account, and that was in perfect conformity with the TOS I acknowledged one year ago. Now I have to let you make my secrets public because some stupid lawyer told you that you have to change the TOS? Or should I just delete my account because it’s no longer conforming with the TOS? Isn’t it too late, given the fact that I’ve read the new TOS only after you’ve published it?
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The only way to deal with people’s stuff should be this: Your stuff hosted on our servers is your responsibility and yours alone; we may grant access to a third party should that third party present us with a court of law written order. End of TOS.
Wake up, Dropbox, what you’ve published as a TOS update is worse than lame; you’re being advised by a person that’s putting you on a shortest course to lose your customers.
Update: What you witness is not Dropbox shooting themselves in the leg, but Dropbox firing three times at their own head… Do you still think it’s a suicide…?
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WTF have this terms of service to do with communism? You should probably learn some history, philosophy, etc. before stating that some totalitarian/authoritarian/etc. behaviour have to do anything with communism. Smells like ignorance here.
PS: And WTF have your posts to do with Maemo to be aggregated on Planet Maemo?
The new rules suggest that anything that everybody has access to everything in the service. By introducing an object into their ecosystem, Dropbox can make it publicly available to everyone without explicit permission. If you have a definition of communism that this is not analogous to, you have an incorrect definition.
I though communism was about common ownership of the means of production.
Exactly. The problem appears when “common ownership” is pulled over “private ownership”. In Dropbox case: I had my private files stored, which are becoming now “common ownership” with only a touch of a pen. Make no mistake, anybody can use private (now “public”) data as production means.
Communism is this: at a specific point in time, private property becomes public property. But you’re right, I should keep reading!
[...] To be honest, this smells of a lawsuit gone bad resulting in bulletproofing a service, maybe someone noticed his files were being served from servers in another country and sued the storage provider on non-permission to copy/distribute grounds. Then, every other lawyer copied the TOS to match. Remember that case with a woman spilling hot coffee on her lap, resulting in all take-away coffee cups showing large “this stuff is hot” labels? Yeah, exactly. There are some great posts on this topic on J. Daniel Sawyer’s blog, and on UtestMe here. [...]
Anyone who seriously ever believed that storing confidential data or “enterprise secrets” in the cloud would be a good idea deserves this.
As a company you DONT give your secrets to an external service that you have no control of. In many cases (basically everywhere outside of the USA) dropbox is a foreign service with entirely different laws.
So yeah, the instant you tell anyone a secret “dont tell nobody” is the instant you lose control over your secret. It is that simple: DONT EVER DO IT! Set up your own cloud storage with servers YOU control!
When nobody restricts this kind of usage, why should I refrain from it?
[...] UtestMe [...]