[dedward]

we called it ripping when it was just audio cds with no drm whatsoever, if im not mistaken. the dmca makes it illegal for you to distribute drm-circumvention tools with some exceptions, but it does not make it illegal for an individual to make a personal copy of anything.

as for the hashing stuff, dropbox etc, that could be considered simply a form of optimization on their part. if its about removing infringing links from their site, and they do, then they have complied. why should they be under some legal obligation to remove links not identified in the takedown notice simply because they used a clever deduplication mechanism, when another site without such a mechanism would not be?

Lets make it even clearer... what if it is my original work, up on dropbox, and i find someone distributing it illegally on another link at dropbox, and serve dropbox with a takedown notice. It would be absolutely wrong to remove my content from my account.....

at some point were going to haveto distinguish between posession of data and distribution of data or this will just get ugly. if you want to make 800 copies of Windows and never use them or distribute them, there is no public or private harm done, though it would violate current copywright laws. time to have the law catch up with the future.