TOS’s are pesky critters. An article I was writing had to be changed because it’s source has been taken down over at Neowin.com.

The article was about dropbox’s TOS, and it maintained they basically own everything you decide to upload there and can do anything they want with it.

On the page I can retrieve on dropbox, here’s what I found:

Note the second paragraph.

Not to belabor the point, this means anything you ever wrote, drew, painted, skinned, photographed or received and decided to use their service to store is theirs to do with as they like. All that “efficiency and ease” in transfer and storage suddenly doesn’t seem all that great, does it?

It includes research, you name it: You put it there it belongs to them, hence the title of this article. As if this weren’t bad enough, it’s up to you to verify and assure them

that everything they feel like taking is really yours because they wouldn’t want to be troubled by anyone else saying “Wait a minute, that’s mine!”.

That’s the classic definition of  “chutzpah” (Heb. “overweaning nerve, gall”), i.e. demanding the mercy of the court after being convicted of murdering your parents because you’re an orphan.

You can read what folks think about their kindly efforts to “simplify” things for us in the blog there http://blog.dropbox.com/?p=846

What makes it worse is the security flubs they've had (discovered last month) which basically left files stored there open for the taking.

People:  I’ve uninstalled dropbox. What you do is up to you.

Now start reading those TOS’s!