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Comment by thecoffman | Hacker News Reader

I can see why Dropbox would be upset about the existence of such a thing, but trying to force people to take it down seems incredibly foolish. The whole issue will garner them negative publicity and people will see it anyways thanks to the Streisand effect.

I had actually missed the original post, but now thanks to their takedown attempts I've downloaded a copy for myself as its very interesting.

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> trying to force people to take it down seems incredibly foolish

As does the fake DMCA takedown. If Arash Ferdowsi wants people to think he's dishonest, he's going the right way about it.

There was no DMCA takedown notice.

That's not what Dropbox say:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2482803

(admittedly, several hours after you posted)

There was no takedown notice. Those emails (erroneously) informed the recipient that a third party had sent a takedown request.

Since when is any publicity ever bad? Isn't this Marketing 101?

Yeah, I wish I had a time machine so I could go pick up some SCO stock.

Assume for a moment that this makes the nightly news. How many people in "average joe" America who don't know about Dropbox will checkout it out and say, "oh man, this is useful! and they even have a free account!" Do they care about this DMCA garbage, or what Dropbox actually did/did not do? Maybe, but the national news won't report it correctly anyway. Here's how it might be spun:

"Hackers, today, are up in arms with Dropbox. The hackers claim that the illegal files being stored there were protected by the first amendment. Dropbox claims that their service could be attacked with those files and removed them."

This won't make the nightly news. This will only be reported to the types of people who 1) already know about dropbox, and 2) understand the significance of DMCA takedowns made in bad faith.

Bad publicity.

You're right, it won't make the nightly news. But, you obviously have no imagination either.

In order to disprove the statement "there is no such thing as negative publicity" one merely needs to produce a circumstance where there is indeed negative publicity. This is pretty trivial to do, and doesn't require imagination.

Disagreement aside, I'd be interesting to know how many signups they had yesterday compared to prior days.

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