| Hey Drew, Alex from JDownloader (an OS project with over 15M activeusers, btw) here. >>"when something pops up that encourages people to turn dropbox into the next rapidshare or equivalent, you can imagine how that could ruin the service for everyone" You don't want to be the next Rapidshare. I encourage you to overthink this. They're your competitor. Sure, if with Rapidshare you mean "illegal file sharing service", which I assume you do, because you use it in one sentence with Torrents, you might be right. Although Rapidshare hasn't hit the deadpool yet and is still around and strong and in compliance with current law etc. But if you mean the highly profitable business of sharing (legal) files, you should think again. They offer the same thing you offer in a way. Cloud storage + backups on a very similar freemium business model. Only for larger files. For some use cases your product might be exorbitantly better (automatically syncing files on a harddrive and not just having it in a filesystem in the cloud like RS), in some ways Rapidshare's product is a lot better though(e.g. sharing larger files with multiple people). But the nature of Rapidshare's product of course comes with a few strings attached. Since the incarnation of filehosting there have been people who try to exploit it for illegal purposes. Rapidshare obviously doesn't have the cleanest image, yet, they comply with the DMCA and offer an incredibly valuable product. And, most importantly: Rapidshare (as well as the majority of one-click-hosters) learned about the Streisand-Effect (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect) early and did not as aggressively about things like this the way you did. Of course our and your situation is different, yet there are a few similarities you could have learned from. This time you have successfully dodged the bullet and made a good strategic move, but I sincerly hope you have also learned sth. from this for the next time, because with user base that is still growing like crazy the next time WILL come. And next time it might hit mainstream media even bigger and not only be on HN and Techmeme. BTW: I can of course understand that you try to fight piracy as good as you can in order to protect the brand as well as the company from expensive lawsuits and their even more hurtful consequences. It's just the way in which you handled things. You should have known better. The Streisand effect has happened to so much companies already. But congrats on handling the situation so well after seeing all the negative feedback. It shows true entrepreneurial skills as well as hard work that some arrogant entrepreneurs don't put in anymore once they have moderate success (in startup terms). |