[LINK] Dropbox ToS Under Fire

[eric scheid]

On 6/7/11 8:35 AM, "Roger Clarke" <Roger.Clarke at xamax.com.au> wrote:

> "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 reasonably necessary for the service," the company's
> revised terms and conditions stated.


Uh yeah ... selective quoting by a journalist strikes again.


>From the TOS: https://www.dropbox.com/terms

    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). By submitting your stuff to the Services, you grant
    us (...) . This license is solely to enable us to technically
    administer, display, and operate the Services. You must ensure you
    have the rights you need to grant us that permission.

That is, if you want to use DropBox to share a file, you need to give
permission to DropBox to share that file.

<http://lawclanger.blogspot.com/2011/07/dropbox-terms-of-service-not-actuall
y.html>

> Is this a massive rights-grap by Dropbox? Well, no. This particular term is
> very common in cloud, blogging and social-networking services. It arises
> because in any cloud-based service the provider has to copy your data in order
> to store it and make it available, and indeed has to publish it if you share
> that data with friends or the world at large. Whilst there are good legal
> arguments that you are implicitly granting Dropbox (or any other provider)
> permission to do this by the act of signing up to the service, for entirely
> understandable reasons Dropbox prefer to make it clear in your user agreement
> that this is what they're going to do, and that you the user are happy with
> it. As one of the comments to the Slashdot story I linked to explains, the
> scary-looking language is actually quite reasonable given how the service is
> used:

e.