Of course you're well within your rights to remove the content from Dropbox itself as it violates your TOS - I think most people are objecting not to that, but to you requesting that copies of the source be removed from third party sites like github.

The attempt to quash knowledge is the offensive part - not the enforcing of your TOS. At least that's my 2 cents.

> illegal file sharing has never been permitted and we take great pains to keep it off of dropbox.

Which is great, except you are punishing the crime, before it even occurred. Remember use of torrents are not illegal per se, sharing files which you do not copyright of, and piracy is.

> there were no legal threats or any other shenanigans to the author or people hosting. (EDIT - No applicable. Read Drew's edit.)

DMCA takedown notice is a legal threat. Worse part is, its not even valid, IANAL, but do you own the copyright of the data or the copyright owner approached you to issue a DMCA takedown notice?

> it auto-generated a DMCA takedown notice to the OP, which as many pointed out here was invalid and particularly inappropriate in this case, and was absolutely not what we intended to do.

Please do not send legal notices, without lawyers reviewing them?

How about not firing anybody and just get back to work?

Most interesting comment to that article:

    Thankfully all DMCA requests are filed under penalty of      
    perjury. If he claims that he owns the copyright to 
    material he doesn’t own, he has now opened himself up 
    to civil litigation.

Really. Seems so: http://www.aaronkellylaw.com/Internet-Law-and-Intellectual-P...

> Which is great, except you are punishing the crime, before it even occurred.

No, they aren't. They're enforcing the terms of use that Dropbox users agreed to when signing up.

I don't think asking folks to take stuff down was the correct solution...I think fixing the bug was the right solution, which they've also done. But, I don't see how Dropbox is "punishing" anyone, when they're just asking people to use the service as it is intended.

Congrats America. We officially torture randoms (some Afghans were given up to the equivalent of a year's salary to turn folks in; quite a nice way of getting rid of some SOB and getting paid). We also violate our laws and constitution, then sit around and circle jerk over whether dunking someone's head under water a couple hundred times until he's just this side of drowning is torture or not. Then, because it's definitely not torture, the cia deletes the videos. Oh, and apparently we now do indefinite detention as well, without legal representation except in front of a kangaroo court, maybe, eventually. Finally, now that we definitely know some people were innocent... we leave them to rot in a cell in Guantanamo.

Good job.

Understandable except the assertion of filing a dmca because he thinks that the reposts of code are "geek rage". The DMCA provides that you may be liable for damages (including costs and attorneys fees) if you falsely claim that an item is infringing your copyrights.

Using this powerful law as a scare tactic isn't acceptable. If you wish to claim that the code was infact infringing, then the conversation is different.

This seems to be:

* illegal use of dmca by dropbox * dropbox says dropship using reverse engineered sync protocol broke anti-circumvention techniques or contains their copyright

Either of which are bold statments

Stallman kind of reminds me of Richard Altmayer from the Asimov store "In A Good Cause--". Brief summary:

The story opens describing a statute of Richard Altmayer that stands in the center of the courtyard of the capital of the galactic union. It has inscribed a quote, "In a good cause, there are no failures", and there are three dates inscribed. They are the three dates Altmayer went to prison for his beliefs.

The story then jumps back to the first date, and tells about the first arrest. At that time, Earth had established many colony planets throughout the galaxy, and many of these had become independent. They were organized into many small groups of allies, and relations were sometimes hostile. A war had just broke out, and Altmayer, and his friend Geoffrey Stock, had just been drafted from college. Stock was preparing to head off to the war. Altmayer was refusing, feeling that humanity must unite, not remain divided. Altmayer is jailed for refusing.

The story then goes to the second incident. Stock did well in the war, and has become a member of the Earth government. He was on the first diplomatic mission from Earth to the one race of intelligent aliens known, the Diaboli. There were more human planets than diaboli planets, but they were one united race, and were expanding faster than humans. Although they required an atmosphere that was poisonous to humans (and our atmosphere was poisonous to them) so there was no competition for habitable planets between us and them, there was competition for resources from non-habitable planets. The Diaboli were taking advantage of the fact that humanity was not unified, negotiating separate deals with different human planets.

Altmayer fears that the Diaboli are a threat to humanity, and tries to force the issue by assassinating a Diaboli diplomatic mission on Earth, hoping to force a war to contain the Diaboli before it is too late. (He's a pacifist when it comes to war between human planets, because he thinks we need to be united. He thinks a war with the Diaboli would actually help accomplish that, as humanity would unite to fight the common enemy).

Stock knows of this plan, and tricks Altmayer, preventing the assassination, and sending Altmayer to jail for the second time.

The story then jumps to the final arrest, which occurs many years later, when Altmayer is an old man. The Diaboli have organized a galactic conference, to organize a Galactic Union. They occupy most of the galaxy, and there has been little expansion of humanity. Altmayer obtains secret documents that show that the Diaboli have been terraforming some human-habitable planets to make them suitable for Diaboli. Some of those worlds were occupied by small colonies.

Altmayer manages to get the documents to a broadcaster before Stock (now leader of Earth's government) comes to arrest him. Stock tells him that the government doesn't support the Diaboli-led plan for galactic union, but can't support exposing the documents. No doubt Altmayer believes, Stock says, that humanity would unite in indignation and defeat the Diaboli, but Stock knows better. The Diaboli would deny the accusations, and several human worlds would find it in their immediate interest to side with the Diaboli. No human worlds could defeat the Diaboli if there were other humans fighting on the Diaboli's side.

Altmayer is disappointed, figuring that Stock will stop the broadcast. Stock says he is not--but after they are broadcast, Earth is going to join the Diaboli in saying they are lies. The other human planets won't believe that--they will think Earth is allied with the Diaboli. No other world will attack Earth if they believe Earth and the Diaboli are cooperating, and they will stay neutral if there is then a future war between Earth and the Diaboli.

Altmayer points out that Stock may fool the other human worlds, but the Diaboli will know that Earth is lying when Earth says the documents are lies. Stock then reveals that the documents ARE lies. His government made them up, and purposefully had them leaked to Altmayer.

The story winds up with Stock visiting Altmayer in jail, to set him free. He tells Altmayer that Earth has been at war with the Diaboli for the last six months. He explains how when he first visited a Diaboli world, he realized it was eventually going to be humanity or them (just as Altmayer had realized). Since then, all of Earth's diplomatic efforts have been toward making it so that when the war with the Diaboli came, no human world would join the Diaboli. When the time came, the Diaboli were no match for Earth. They ha never fought a war, whereas Earth had fought many wars with other human planets, and so had much more experience and much better military technology. The Diaboli main fleet has been defeated, at almost no casualties to Earth. The other human worlds are now jumping in to declare war on the Diaboli. Most are calling to now unite and form a galactic union. Stock wants Altmayer to be Earth's representative to the galactic conference to form the union. Altmayer was always the voice in the wilderness, crying for union. His words will carry much weight.

Altmayer is stunned and doesn't understand, since Stock turns out to have been right all along. Stock tells Altmayer that he always misunderstood human nature. When the United Worlds is formed, and future generations look back, they will have forgotten the purpose behind Stock's methods. He will represent war and death. Altmayer's idealism and calls for union will be remembered forever. Altmayer barely hears his last words as he leaves: "and when they build their statues, they will build none for me".

Just because the US/AU/UK/Can are better places to live than Russia, China, N. Korea, or most of Africa doesn't mean we should allow the stuff Western governments are pulling to slide. I don't know if the countries that are orders of magnitude worse than the Western governments were always that way, but my guess would be that they were, at one point, not so bad, relatively. It was likely a slow path that led them to decline to the point they have today. I don't want to see my government go down the same path.

I'd count that response as a win. An "I am skeptical" from RMS is really mild -- it's like he actually told you he'd take what you said into consideration.

He'll be so very brutally honest if he disagrees with you.

That's awesome news. Congratulations to the Wufoo team -- it is well deserved. (Their product is awesome.)

It is also great news for SaaS startup generally, since Wufoo is a little of column A and a little of column B on the typical grow via revenues VS get investment and grow massively dichotomy. That's a data point in the favor of at least some investors making investments in companies which have a projected trajectory where massive success results in a company on the scale of 37Signals/FogCreek/Wufoo rather than resulting in a company on the scale of Zynga/Groupon. $35 million won't exactly have VCs salivating but, oh well, if they don't invest they don't get a vote -- the angels and employees of Wufoo have to be happy like clams at this outcome.

> we've fixed the deduplication behavior serverside

Great, and that's all you should've done in this case.

The cloud is a vehicle for hourly billing and instant provisioning.

If you are not actively using either of those features, you should look into dedicated or colo. Now.

On every other front besides billing/provisioning, it will lose to dedicated: Speed, Price, Performance, Server Specs and control.

The cloud should be used to handle unexpected workload or random jobs only. If you are running your 50x database cluster on ec2 for 100% of the month, you are doing it wrong.

I don't mind sociopaths; they are what they are. What I mind is the sugar-coating of sociopathic behavior that's actually flat-out unethical as 'naughtiness' so these people can be treated as innovative rule-benders rather than creeps.

Doing many of these 'sociopathic' things is a lot like going to a small country town where people leave their doors unlocked and burgling the houses there; you're violating a lot of unwritten and only mildly enforced rules. What bothers me is the idea that you will be specifically rewarded for this kind of behavior if you can spin it as a 'Country Town Social Hack'.