Here's another idea: a service that identifies hash values for popular-but-copyright-encumbered files, which you can feed into your (patched copy of) Dropbox client and pretend you're about to upload it. Bam, it appears in your Dropbox account!
And sneakier still, a remote hosted bit torrent client that automates that process for you in a way that can provably show you never downloaded the copyrighted file, you just had a number on your drive, which if interpreted as a SHA256 hash key happened to identify a duplicate of the copyright file on Dropbox... (I'd be spectacularly impressed if someone managed to make _that_ trick fly on court in a precedent setting manner!)
That's wonderfully devious. And probably quite straightforward to implement.
I hope it doesn't happen, because that'd be a bit of a nightmare for Dropbox. They could blacklist known pirate rips of movies and the like, but what do you do when you receive a takedown notice for DRM-free content that some users are legitimately storing, but Dropbox is now (accidentally) illegally distributing? Could be the end of global de-duping.
If this really became a problem for Dropbox, one response would be to have the server issue random challenges to clients that purport to have the file.
Comments
Here's another idea: a service that identifies hash values for popular-but-copyright-encumbered files, which you can feed into your (patched copy of) Dropbox client and pretend you're about to upload it. Bam, it appears in your Dropbox account!
And sneakier still, a remote hosted bit torrent client that automates that process for you in a way that can provably show you never downloaded the copyrighted file, you just had a number on your drive, which if interpreted as a SHA256 hash key happened to identify a duplicate of the copyright file on Dropbox... (I'd be spectacularly impressed if someone managed to make _that_ trick fly on court in a precedent setting manner!)
That's wonderfully devious. And probably quite straightforward to implement.
I hope it doesn't happen, because that'd be a bit of a nightmare for Dropbox. They could blacklist known pirate rips of movies and the like, but what do you do when you receive a takedown notice for DRM-free content that some users are legitimately storing, but Dropbox is now (accidentally) illegally distributing? Could be the end of global de-duping.
If this really became a problem for Dropbox, one response would be to have the server issue random challenges to clients that purport to have the file.