[dhouston]

we have a variety of easy-to-use sharing mechanisms (public links, shared folders, etc.) that people have been using for a long time for legitimate uses.

to be clear, we _never issued_ any DMCA takedowns to anyone -- the OP incorrectly received a bizarrely-worded email from us saying we had received a takedown notice from ourselves (no such notice ever existed) for which we've apologized.

[random42]

> to be clear, we _never issued_ any DMCA takedowns to anyone

Thanks. Already updated in the comment.

[pbhjpbhj]

>"to be clear, we _never issued_ any DMCA takedowns to anyone"

That's just disingenuous legalistic manoeuvring though isn't it. You claimed that you had issued a notice, to yourselves, and it was outside of the email recipients ability (without issuing an injunction - or whatever the process is in your jurisdiction) to confirm your claim. They took your word on it.

So fraud or a DMCA.

But no you say it was just "a mistake".

Forgive my cynicism but this is standard fare for the legal departments of big business, using the law to bully people who financially can't afford to protect themselves against false claims.

[nl]

No, if I understand Drew's statement correctly:

They have a system they use for IP enforcement that bans based on file hash. They used this system to ban the files.

A side effect of this system is that it sends a DMCA notice to anyone who has a copy of that file hash (because that has always been what it was used for before). I'm guessing inside the hash-ban tool there is a field "owner" or something, which they filled in as "Dropbox" and is used as the source of the DMCA notice.

I don't think there is any conspiracy here. Never ascribe to malice what can be ascribed to incompetence. I's pretty harsh to call Dropbox incompetence, but given how it would make sense for their system to work, I think a mistake is a fair description.

[thaumaturgy]

I don't think cynicism is justifiable here. Let's use Occam's Razor:

1. Dropbox staff hand-crafted oddly-worded DMCA takedown notices and purposefully sent those to specific individuals after having already sent them polite requests to remove certain content;

2. Dropbox staff hand-crafted oddly-worded DMCA takedown notices at some point in the past as part of an automated system, which fired incorrectly when staff removed content.

To me, #2 makes a lot more sense, and is the simpler (and in this analysis, the more likely) case.

[Goronmon]

To be clear, Dropbox isn't wording any takedown notices. These are just automated e-mails saying that content is being removed because Dropbox itself received a takedown notice from a third-party and that they are complying.

[Goronmon]

Actually, you are misrepresenting the issue here from what I understand.

No notice was sent to anyone. What the e-mail that was sent claimed was that Dropbox had received a DMCA takedown notice from a third-party and that's why the file was taken down. However, that was just an automated response to any file being taken down using whatever mechanism they had in place.

I'm not sure where the "law" is being used to bully people who can't afford it in this case.

[pbhjpbhj]

If you mean that I, pbhjpbhj, am misrepresenting then please read the quote and first line again.

My point was that whilst they were not issuing a notice they were claiming a notice had been issued and as Dropbox were the claimed issuer and receiver of said [non-existent] notice that without legal action the recipient of the claim could not confirm. For all intents and purposes the recipient of the claim is in the same position as if a notice has been issued.

I thought I'd made it clear enough. I did not once, knowingly, claim that an actual DMCA notice had been issued - hence the contentious suggestion of fraud (in claiming they had received a DMCA when they hadn't and using that claim as rationale to remove [the link to] the files from their clients account).

>I'm not sure where the "law" is being used to bully people who can't afford it in this case.

It goes something like this:

'Oh, I'm sorry Mr Nongrata I've got to take down your perfectly legal website because we got issued with a DMCA; why yes of course you can challenge that [big fat lie], mount a court case against the issuer. What's that you don't have $100k to spend getting it to court, oh too bad. Muahahahaha'.

In any case, it doesn't matter if the Dropbox team are nice guys it matters if the people behind Sequoia Capital et al. are the sort to use a legal threat to protect their millions of pounds of investment.