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Re:Dropbox Attempts To Kill Open Source Project by ChuckMcM on Monday April 25, 2011 @09:18PM (#2483617)
"Thanks, It was helpful information. As said before IANAL."

Not only are you not a lawyer, but you are also struggling with some basic concepts regarding the implementation of laws.

Laws, implemented as statutes, have no association with, or bearing on, morals which are purely a cultural phenomena.

I understand that you disagree with how Dropbox went about protecting themselves from civil liability, however the violated no laws by their actions.

Re:Dropbox Attempts To Kill Open Source Project by random42 on Tuesday April 26, 2011 @01:03AM (#2484058)
> I understand that you disagree with how Dropbox went about protecting themselves from civil liability.

I absolutely do not disagree with how Dropbox went about protecting themselves. What I disagree with is, trying to claim a tool or technology can be anti-law, rather than its usage.

All pieces of technology, from Atom energy to Internet, can be used for both wonderfully good or evil. What I am trying to say is, Laws are (should be) applied how a technology is used, not what technology is used.

That being said, I am not trying to defend or endorse dropship's reverse-engineering of Dropbox's proprietary code, and hence infringing the ToS. It certainly looks illegal.

> however the violated no laws by their actions.

Never disagreed.

Re:Dropbox Attempts To Kill Open Source Project by edw on Tuesday April 26, 2011 @09:43AM (#2485117)
Are laws purely a cultural phenomenon? Do laws have no association with morals? Your sentiments sound more like the product of an ideology and less like conclusions based on an anthropological, historical, philosophical, or any sort of open-minded inquiry into culture, societies, and human nature.

Additionally, you're conflating society, which is comprised of a group of people, with culture, which is a product of a group of people that aren't necessarily members of the same society.

Re:Dropbox Attempts To Kill Open Source Project by ChuckMcM on Tuesday April 26, 2011 @12:45PM (#2486052)
I wasn't conflating society and culture. American society, the group of people who are citizens of the United States of America, is a superset of the Christian culture.

Christian culture defines a moral code by which they measure themselves. That culture is present in many societies and can influence (or not) the societal debate on governance (witness the current California constitutional ban on Gay Marriage as an example).

That leads to people who are culturally opposed to laws enacted by the society in which they happen to live.

Laws are enacted by the constituents of a nation-state as a means of defining roles, rights, and remedies. The process by which they are proposed, debated, and enacted is internally consistent but varies between governing bodies.

Re:Dropbox Attempts To Kill Open Source Project by edw on Tuesday April 26, 2011 @04:44PM (#2487125)
You're wrong. You're not even wrong, to be more precise. Your comments are filled with inconsistent use of terminology and drift between discussions of individual people, cultures (semi-coherent bodies of artistic, intellectual, and artistic achievement), and societies (aggregates of people who more or less share a culture, physical space, and institutions).

If you re-phrase whatever point you were trying to make by consistently using words with meanings we can agree on, then maybe we'll have something to disagree about.