The good news is, Dropbox is almost certainly not proactively scanning for copyright violations. Does that mean Dropbox is scanning for copyrighted material just as they are for child porn? After all, the technology exists. Some users have found that they can’t generate public sharing URLs for certain files, and some have even had their accounts deactivated for copyright violations. For some time, Calibre users have used Dropbox to host their Calibre2OPDS libraries, which builds a web content management system around individual users’ Calibre libraries. Something else it has in common with e-books is the use of Dropbox itself. Though, of course, e-books are considerably more innocuous-even the ones that are shared illegally. Funny to think that it should have that fact in common with e-books. The article goes into a good deal of detail about how the Internet and digital media have been responsible for a resurgence in child porn, as it suddenly became possible to mass-distribute it in ways that analog media never permitted. Although Dropbox transmissions are “encrypted,” the encryption is only good against outsiders-meanwhile, Dropbox itself can run upload filters to pick out child porn images and videos. A remarkable number of child-porn collectors treat Dropbox as a “safe” storage spot for files they don’t want to have on their own computers-but are entirely unaware that Dropbox itself would have a few things to say about that.Īlthough the company is mum on exactly how it does it, Dropbox seems to have some kind of photo identification technology that can pick out child porn images when users upload them, and it regularly passes that information on to law-enforcement agencies. Just goes to show you that self-publishing authors come from all walks of life and all different day jobs.īut the more interesting thing to me has to do with Dropbox and child porn. It’s an interesting, dramatic story, and it intersects with TeleRead’s coverage area in an unexpected way-the detective who had been assigned to arrest the 19-year-old happens to be a self-published author (and you can buy his books on Amazon). Ars Technica has a feature article about a 19-year-old child-porn collector who was detected and turned in by Dropbox and then stopped by a brave man at a chess club meeting as he approached with knives to try to stab some kids.
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