New Dropbox TOS

A. Grandt wrote on 7/2/2011, 5:53 AM
I know some of you are using Dropbox, so you might want to know that they've changed their TOS, pretty much taking a page from Facebook, granting themselves and their partners more or less unrestricted royalty free rights to any materials their users upload to the service.

Discussion on Slashdot:
[url=http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/07/02/0515218/Dropbox-TOS-Includes-Broad-Copyright-License]

Comments

musicvid10 wrote on 7/2/2011, 8:35 AM
"'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.'"

That's almost word-for-word circumvention of US Copyright statute, and goes so far as to include performance rights too. Think of it as granting someone unlimited license to take your intellectual property and use it for their own gain. I'll be taking down a couple of my personal creations and hosting them privately.

Their use of the word "stuff" in an attempt to trivialize the impact is like saying if you rent a storage locker, the business has the right to take anything they want, at any time, for any purpose.

Also, drawing in millions of users under one reassuring TOS (which I read) and then changing the terms once they are there, is just plain shady. I just knew there was a catch when they made it so easy to get 2 GB of free storage.

Think what would happen if I uploaded my best friend's video to share with family and friends with his knowledge and permission, and then Dropbox stole it and plastered it all over the internet. This one will end up in court, of that I'm quite certain.

NickHope wrote on 7/2/2011, 11:35 AM
I can see why they need to have that clause for stuff you put in the public folder, but not for stuff in other folders. I bet they lose a lot of customers and end up backtracking and differentiating between the two.
farss wrote on 7/2/2011, 2:02 PM
How can we grant them something we don't have the right to, for example as Musicivd said other peoples copyright works. Only they can grant such rights.

On the other hand perhaps they need such a clause so they cannot be held accountable for copyright violations. Not so long ago I had a pretty heated discussion with someone who is party to an ongoing case seeking huge sums from the providers of a "carriage service".

Bob.
Steve Mann wrote on 7/2/2011, 7:30 PM
You are overreacting. Every cloud storage service has similar language in their TOS. What DropBox is doing (according to eWeek) is to find duplicate files across all users and delete all but one and put a link to the file into the user dropboxes.
NickHope wrote on 7/3/2011, 1:50 AM
In my view there is a problem with the words "we think" in "...to the extent we think it necessary for the Service." Basically it means any use is permitted as long as they think it's justified.

Mediafire's equivalent qualification is "FOR THE SOLE PURPOSE OF ENABLING US TO MAKE YOUR CONTENT AVAILABLE THROUGH THE SERVICE. ", which I prefer.
TheHappyFriar wrote on 7/3/2011, 4:45 AM
This site's TOS says the same thing. You could make a tutorial video on ProType (for example) & Sony has the right to take it & market it how they see fit.

EDIT: even says any files you're able to download from this site are theirs. That would mean Excalibur & Ultimate S are theirs because they're linked to from this site.

Normally an e-mail to a legal department clears this stuff up. SCS's EULA had (has?) a clause that you can't use the software for commercial purposes. I have (saved) a long e-mail between me, a SCS rep & their lawyer saying it's meant to say you can't use the software itself for commercial purposes (leasing, etc.), the content created you can.
CClub wrote on 7/3/2011, 5:06 AM
I think all of the negative response has them worried and they're needing to clarify... which is a good thing but I don't think they're as far as they should be yet:

http://blog.dropbox.com/?p=846
[Update 2 - 7/2] – An update based on your feedback:
Some of you have written us with very understandable concerns about the legal-sounding parts. In particular, our new TOS talks about the licenses we need to run Dropbox. We want to be 100% clear that you own what you put in your Dropbox. We don’t own your stuff. And the license you give us is really limited. It only allows us to provide the service to you. Nothing else.

We think it’s really important that you understand the license. It’s about the permissions you give us to run the service, things like creating public links when you ask us to, allowing you to collaborate with colleagues in shared folders, generating web previews or thumbnails of your files, encrypting files, creating backups… the basic things that make Dropbox safe and easy to use. Services like Google Docs and others do the same thing when they get these permissions (see, for example, section 11.1 of Google’s TOS).

We wish we didn’t have to use legal terms at all, but copyright law is complicated and if we don’t get these permissions in writing, we might be putting ourselves in a tough spot down the road. Not to bore you with the details, but please take a look at the license term in the TOS. We think it’s fair and strikes the right balance: “This license is solely to enable us to technically administer, display, and operate the Services.”

We want to thank everybody who wrote in, understanding your concerns helps us make Dropbox better.

Drew & Arash
TheHappyFriar wrote on 7/3/2011, 10:03 AM
This is the second time on this forum this year someone's posted about dropbox's TOS, isn't it? Both for the same reason?