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Re:Dropship — successor to torrents? by wladimir on Sunday April 24, 2011 @07:30AM (#2478688)
Arash (the CTO) asked me to, in a really civil way. So I decided to respect his wish and take down the repository.

Myself, I really regarded dropship as a nice feature. As Dropbox had implemented the great idea of putting all humanity's data in one big hash-addressable vat, sharing is a logical extension. If you would cache the popular blocks locally (dropbox already does this in a way with LAN P2P), global data distribution would be pretty much a solved problem.

Obviously, this affects legal and illegal files in the same way. It's really a shame that people are still so obsessed with the illegal applications, that they become blinded to how useful this is for legal ones.

Re:Dropship — successor to torrents? by scotty79 on Sunday April 24, 2011 @10:28AM (#2478894)
Did he give any rationale for his request?
Re:Dropship — successor to torrents? by wladimir on Sunday April 24, 2011 @01:13PM (#2479202)
Yes, as I kind of hinted at in my post, the main reason is that they don't want the stigma that is associated with file sharing.

Even though there is a lot of (social) legal sharing going on between users, the focus is always on illegal sharing. He has a point there, though I think it's a pity.

IMO it's not even that suited to piracy, as the deduplication means that they can find everyone that has a file! Torrents are way better for that.

The principles of dropship could be used for sharing photos, videos, public datasets, git-like source control, or even as building block for wiki-like distributed databases. The possibilities are endless when every file can be called up with just its hash.

Re:Dropship — successor to torrents? by Jd on Sunday April 24, 2011 @02:11PM (#2479297)
There is a way around this. Charge the person sharing the file a certain amount of money after a certain bandwidth (rather than the person downloading the file). This would virtually prevent large scale piracy without preventing many other usages.
Re:Dropship — successor to torrents? by p09p09p09 on Sunday April 24, 2011 @01:15PM (#2479209)
I've been sending TV shows to friends privately since I started using dropbox. Never seen a takedown. As long as they don't get a dmca, I doubt they care.

If they did how hard would it be to pad media files with some salt to break hashing anyways? Not hard at all...

Re:Dropship — successor to torrents? by jamesbkel on Sunday April 24, 2011 @04:09PM (#2479510)
I've been doing the same, but on a very small scale. Mostly sending a funny episode of some show to a group of friends or occasionally sending a movie to my folks. I don't doubt that if I was mass distributing these files it would attract attention.

Also, wouldn't breaking the hash nullify one of the ostensible advantages of this method (the de-dupe of the stored files)? If the goal is solving global file distribution, making each copy of every originally-identical file unique - and therefore requiring n times the storage - isn't a viable solution.

Re:Dropship — successor to torrents? by wolfparade on Sunday April 24, 2011 @11:09AM (#2478955)
I think that's a very poor business choice by Arash. Third party developers need freedom.
Re:Dropship — successor to torrents? by DrJokepu on Sunday April 24, 2011 @12:21PM (#2479089)
They don't want their brand associated with piracy. According to the developer, they have resolved the issue in a civil way. I don't see a problem here.
Re:Dropship — successor to torrents? by zacharypinter on Sunday April 24, 2011 @01:35PM (#2479238)
Think of all the bandwidth charges Dropbox would be incurring if this took off. They'd have to make the service more expensive for everyone.