I think it's worse that dropbox dedupes files, which means that they(dropbox) already have infrastructure that could seriously combat their use in infringement.
I do wonder how this plays into the whole Swizz Beats is CEO news.
I don't think dedupe seriously combats use in infringement - it just forces pirates to repack/recompress their infringing content into many different forms, which pretty much happens anyway since lots of "torrent warez" groups like to put their names and spam links on everything.
From a legal/rights-holder standpoint that's a double-edged sword - it could be argued that because Dropbox dedupe files, they have a head start on DMCA compliance, but it could also be argued that the technical infrastructure means they should be better at removing infringing content.
it does because I'm fairly sure they aren't deduping at the file level - which means they're doing significant introspection into exactly how different copies of the same file are. This is why dropbox is so fast - they only need to send unique diffs.
Content recompressed with a different file format at a different compression level will almost certainly not match, and many pirate sites use encrypted RARs which will all differ from each other almost entirely.
That's why I think the "Megaupload took down only one link rather than all the infringing content" aspect of this indictment is so scary, especially for a site that does perform introspection into its hosted files - it's easy for a judge to go from "you can send only unique differences" to "you can locate every instance of this copyrighted content and remove it or else."
The indictment papers specifically claim that megaupload was also dedupping files (general allegation 22.)
That's related to their claim that the DMCA take down requests weren't honored: Allegedly, while appearing to comply with requests to remove infringing content, they would merely take down the reported links, yet would keep alternate links to the same md5-hash-matching content working.
I do wonder how this plays into the whole Swizz Beats is CEO news.