Dropbox Assigned Patent

Dropbox, Inc., San Francisco, CA, has been assigned a patent (9,361,349) developed by Newhouse, Benjamin Zeis, San Francisco, CA, for a “storage constrained synchronization of shared content items.”

The abstract of the patent published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office states: ”A content management system synchronizes content items across client computing systems connected by a network. Each client device has a storage allocation for synchronized shared content items. If the storage allocation for shared content items on a client device is exceeded by the request to add or edit a content item such that it is enlarged, or open a large content item remote to the client device, a client application or the host of content management system selects content items to remove from residence on the client device but keep remotely on content management system. Upon removal of the selected content items, the client application creates shadow items, representing the content item but only containing the metadata of the content item. This creates sufficient space for the initial request to be completed while maintaining user access to all synchronized shared content items.“

The patent application was filed on January 30, 2015 (14/611,115).