Dropbox institutes a copyright no-fly list: file hashing against a blacklist
In Cloud-computing, two surefire ways to go out of business quickly are:
1. Violate your customer’s privacy
2. Non-compliance with intellectual property law
So how does a SaaS company insure compliance with a copyright takedown notice without breaching customer privacy? According to TechCrunch, Dropbox’s new solution is file hashing against a blacklist. The new system apparently allows Dropbox “to block pre-selected files from being shared from person-to-person (thus keeping Dropbox from getting raided by the Feds), without their anti-infringement system having any idea what most of your files actually are.”
It will be interesting to see if the rest of the Cloud follows Dropbox.
It will also be interesting to see how Dropbox insures their list of pre-selected files do not actually belong to the user.