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Considering Dropbox doesn't do automatic upgrades (at least on a Mac it doesn't), you can always stay at an older version of the client where this new protocol isn't supported and thus Dropship still is valid. I doubt that Dropbox would ever ban previous versions of their client purely for this purpose.

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They could still do something. In cases where they have reason to suspect this is going on (which could be based on file usage patterns), they could start asking clients to send the file. Clients that start an upload and then disconnect when asked for the file are pretty much caught red handed, and you could just block their accounts until they upgrade to the next version.

For older clients they could require upload of the full file (same as if the file has never been uploaded). For new clients you could use the challenge/response scheme.

I believe they've already implemented the former. If the de-dup benefits were significant they could implement the latter.

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