[LINK] Dropbox ToS Under Fire

[Marghanita da Cruz]

eric scheid wrote:
> 
> Uh yeah ... selective quoting by a journalist strikes again.
> 

or is it a publicity campaign?
<http://www.quotesdaddy.com/quote/960431/Oscar+Wilde/the-only-thing-worse-than-being-talked-about-is-not>

This was tweeted a few days ago...:
> Looking to ditch #Dropbox? I use @SpiderOak now and impressed. referral 
link  http://is.gd/kMGptF   and we both get 1GB extra for life!

For my part, my latest forray into social networking has been playing with
Github social coding - I liked the idea that they host open source code for
free. If you want to use it for closed source code you can pay. There are 
bits of it that I am not comfortable with...but better that it is open 
source than closed source software, itself.
<https://github.com/marghanita>

Marghanita

> 
>>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.
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Link mailing list
> Link at mailman.anu.edu.au
> http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link
> 


-- 
Marghanita da Cruz
http://ramin.com.au
Tel: 0414-869202