it necessary for the Service." Put it in the Cloud? Are You Nuts? at Literary Abominations Reply With Quote + Reply to Thread Quick Navigation Writing Questions [...] I agree with fidgetwidget. Imagine a situation without this TOS, where an artist puts up a file they own and shares it so that some business associates can access it. The artist does not cover their rights adequately and the business plans go bad, and their content is stolen by one of those said business associates. Because the artist hasn't covered their rights properly, they have no recourse to recover losses from the bad business associates, however they consider trying to recover their losses instead from Dropbox, who hosted the files during the transaction. With this TOC, Dropbox is non-liable for the user's losses, but without this TOC, Dropbox would be vulnerable to a potentially huge pay out. Dropbox can clearly not run their business with that risk, hence the TOC. There are many other possible scenarios of liability that Dropbox would be vulnerable to without these TOC. (e.g. illegal file sharing). Thus Dropbox simply runs a line of needing to keep customers, but protect themselves from the risks associated with the service they provide. Hence the TOC terms are very important both for customer impressions and limitation of liability in case of problems. There might also be some element of Dropbox wanting to protect and reserve rights to create further value from non-paying customers by analysing users files to create data