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Assuming this is copyright related... probably not. The only way this could be done in practice would be for Justin Roiland/Williams Street/Rick & Morty LLC/Car
by kmeisthax 4y ago
Assuming this is copyright related... probably not. The only way this could be done in practice would be for Justin Roiland/Williams Street/Rick & Morty LLC/Cartoon Network/Warner Bros. to legally indemnify Dropbox - as in, agree to pay all of Dropbox's legal fees and damages if they get sued for copyright infringement outside of their DMCA 512 safe harbor. This is entirely impractical for an individual to pull off, and Dropbox might not even have a copyright indemnity policy for corporate clients.
Also, if anyone actually has a bone to pick with Dropbox over shared links, this is probably a very bad idea, because it would just be opening WB's far larger pockets to whoever Justin is pirating content from. There is no actual legal provision for "creators" to get away with copyright infringement that we cannot.
And let me be perfectly clear: It is not legal to copy media over any kind of file share, even privately within an organization, unless you have a copyright license, which they clearly don't. Censorship[0] on-demand in exchange for liability limitation is the world that all these media companies chose to live in. They screamed their heads off about the harms of noncommercial piracy over the Internet while also, apparently, pirating enough content internally that Dropbox needed to shut off their account. If they want their account back, then either pay for a license to every video file on that share or publicly lobby Congress to legalize file sharing.
Or this could have nothing to do with copyright and some internal spam filter just shat the bed very badly. The original linked tweet didn't clarify anything and Justin might just not even have anything to clarify with. I really hate how modern tech companies are allowed to do summary executions of accounts like this with no explanation.
[0] I am willing to accept the "copyright infringement is not speech" argument, which SCOTUS also does, but DMCA 512 still allows censorship of novel speech because the counternotice procedure is laughably inadequate.
- towaway15463 4y agobet you a dollar that they were taken down because they were sharing links to content they had created for Rick and Morty etc and Dropbox’s dumb algo just didn’t know that they were the creators of that content.
- heretogetout 4y agoIf that's the case surely they could have told him that was the reason. Otherwise we're talking about software engineers deliberately writing code to waste other people's time and make the Dropbox product look worse to their customers or prospective customers.
- AlexandrB 4y ago> Otherwise we're talking about software engineers deliberately writing code to waste other people's time and make the Dropbox product look worse to their customers or prospective customers. Seems true-to-form. This has been Dropbox's product strategy for the last 5 years.
- kmeisthax 4y agoDropbox only hashes files that they've gotten DMCA takedowns for. So WB told Dropbox "do not allow people to share Rick & Morty", and then got angry because they couldn't share Rick & Morty internally. This isn't a false positive, the algorithm is working exactly as intended.
- sleepybrett 4y agoexcept they should have notified their customer of the dmca violations on their account, if they did not .. that would run afoul of the dmca, right?
- kmeisthax 4y agoYes, because you need to be able to counternotify; this is why I was a little suspicious of the "it's a copyright problem" explanation. However, if they had ignored prior notices and continued infringing, then Dropbox needs to shut off their account because they're a repeat infringer, and that process might just look the same as any other TOS violation ban.
- shkkmo 4y ago> whoever Justin is pirating content from Wow, you've made a huge assumption here.
- nix0n 4y agoHe's not the legal owner of the content he creates.
- shkkmo 4y agoI would be highly suprised if he doesn't have the right to distribute his work in a small scale non-commercially, especially as part of the process of creating that work. You have made a huge and baseless assumption that there was any copyright infringement happening.
- addingnumbers 4y agoSurely he's the legal owner of much of it, unless you're trying to imply he doesn't do any creative work at all outside the scope of his current contracts.
- colejohnson66 4y agoOwning a majority of a work does not give you the right to share the other parties' work.