Dropbox and Dropship

You may have heard about Dropbox, a cloud storage and file synching company, trying to kill off an open source project. Of abusive DMCA takedown notices, and Dropbox deleting files from users accounts. Maybe you haven't, so I thought I'd spread the news.

Dropship is an open source python script written by Wladimir van der Laan. It exploits the dropbox hashing system to allow you to download files that other people have on their dropbox, or allow other people to download files from yours without making them public. This has some useful applications, such as if you wanted to give a file to one person without making it public. However, it also has the ability to be used for the downloading of pirated files, and dropper didn't like it one bit.

Dropbox quickly contacted Wladimir van der Laan, asking him to take down Dropship from github (where it was hosted), which he complied with. Several people heard about this, and in typical internet fashion, put up mirrors of Dropship, in various places, including public dropbox folders. Dropbox issued several DMCA takedown notices, against an open source project nonetheless, and deleted the files from dropbox user's accounts. It has rescinded the DMCA takedown notices however.


Its easy to understand why dropbox wouldn't want people to know about the way they do their hashing, and how this could be misused. However, it is also wrong to abuse the DMCA in an attempt to scare people into doing what you want. So is censorship. Comment how you feel about this, here's a link to a mirror if anyone wants one.