17 ms·

Cloudflare doesn’t have to cut off copyright-infringing websites, judge rules

407 points by eastdakota 5y ago

raxxorrax 5y ago
Pretty sensible and important judgement considering how destructive and plentiful wrong DMCA claims alone have been.
nawgz 5y ago
Not a lawyer, but this seems like a good result for the internet.
- t-writescode 5y ago
  You were downvoted at my time of reading this; but, I have to agree. We constantly talk about how copyright enforcement on memes, etc, would break the internet, and we're constantly yelling about YouTube breaking Fair Use exceptions of copyrighted material, and so on. Cloudflare not being forced to take down content due to claimed copyright infringement seems exactly in line with protecting the internet and freedom of thought and creativity as a whole. I'd love to know why people are against it. They can still choose to take down copyright infringing material, but they're not obligated by power of the gun / legal / monetary / use-of-force rammifications. Edit: disclosure: of course I'm not a lawyer, etc, blah blah.
  - 0des 5y ago
    You know cloudflare still chooses arbitrarily to remove sites from their service, right? What we are talking about here is one small sliver of the pie, so while this one thing (piracy) wont get you yanked, your political beliefs will (and have). Cloudflare has great utility that benefits a lot of us, but I think some day we will realize how much this centralization is a tradeoff that hurts the internet as a whole, no matter how cool the people are who work there.
    - strken 5y ago
      The centralisation isn't Cloudflare's fault, it's the consequence of a world where botnets can pump 100gbps at you. What's the trade-off here? They protect you from DDoS attacks and it's great, vs they don't and your site goes down? I don't really understand what's being traded off here.
      - wizzwizz4 5y ago
        They protect you from DDoS attacks, except: • They see – and usually HTTPS MitM, all the traffic. (I trust them not to abuse that… just about.) • When Cloudflare goes down (which it does), lots of stuff goes down at once. Your redundancy is for nothing. • Centralisation of power enables abuse of power; no matter how good you are, you will abuse your power. I (a generally well-meaning person) have relatively little power, so my small abuses basically harm nobody. Cloudflare has massive power, so its small abuses can harm tens of people each. • Their CAPTCHA walls reduce accessibility, discriminate against Tor users, and make Cloudflare-“protected” sites unusable on a wide variety of systems. Since Cloudflare's the only Cloudflare, a webmaster who doesn't like this basically has to lump it.
        zaphar 5y ago
        All a webmaster who doesn't like it has to do is not use Cloudflare. If you need Cloudflare then you need TLS MiTM and those Captchas and you are glad they exist. If you don't need Cloudflare and don't like them then just don't use them. Like it or not those features exist to fill actual needs from the sites Cloudflare protects.
        wizzwizz4 5y ago
        There are ways to make accessible CAPTCHAs. It's possible to not discriminate against Tor users unless somebody's attacking the site from Tor. Cloudflare does neither of these things. Cloudflare's CAPTCHA is now hCaptcha, which uses Cloudflare. If you want to get an “accessibility token” (or whatever) to bypass the inaccessible CAPTCHAs, you may have to first complete CAPTCHAs.
edude03 5y ago
Happy to hear it.
johnklos 5y ago
They lied to the judge: "[R]emoving material from a cache without removing it from the hosting server would not prevent the direct infringement from occurring," Chhabria wrote. That's just patently untrue. A web site using Cloudflare's services isn't available to the Internet once Cloudflare stops providing services, until the site's hosting is meaningfully reconfigured. You can't say it's just caching, because you can't access the site in any reasonably normal way via any method other than going through Cloudflare. That's just plain old bullshit.
- indymike 5y ago
  Depends on configuration. Setting up a failover where if the CDN/ cache fails or is removed, the request is routed to a live server is more than possible.
- sodality2 5y ago
  > That's just patently untrue. Removing it from the cache does nothing except making Cloudflare drop it. If Cloudflare "removes material from their cache" it DOESN'T prevent any infringement, because the request will hit the main server (and possibly Cloudflare will cache it). If cloudflare kicks them off, that's different than just "removing material from the cache" which seems to be what the argument is.
  - sodality2 5y ago
    > If cloudflare kicks them off, that's different than just "removing material from the cache" which seems to be what the argument is. Let me add onto this, even w/o Cloudflare, that STILL won't stop infringements, as other CDN's or even no CDN can be used. It just clears Cloudflare of guilt/responsibility they may have.
- onion2k 5y ago
  As I understand it Cloudflare is essentially a caching proxy. If the site isn't in the cache then Cloudflare fetches it and passes it on, and also saves it in the cache for the subsequent requests. Removing it from the cache will just make every request look like it's the first one.
partiallypro 5y ago
We have a client that had someone make a direct copy of their website, same branding, same everything and put it on a domain running through Cloudflare. We've reached out to Cloudflare to get them to take it down but nothing has been done. You also have a Cloudflare account to file a complaint, which I found to be odd. We're a Cloudflare customer too...but still that shouldn't be a hoop you have to jump through. Now there is this identical phishing site out there that Cloudflare reverse proxies and we can't see who registered the domain or who hosts the site (since Cloudflare masks the IPs.)
- henhouse 5y ago
  Cloudflare forwards DMCA copyright infringement complaints to the hosting provider, probably automatically to an abuse@ domain that it can detect. I’m not sure if they do the same for any other copyright claims, but they do pass it on to the parties that should be involved.
  - adrr 5y ago
    But don't they store the copyrighted content on their servers? It's one thing just to be a transit mechanism it's another thing to store and serve copyrighted material like a hosting a provider.
    - dymk 5y ago
      Well, they don’t _not_ store it - their whole dealio is they cache website content on their servers. Not forever, but they’re not just a transit mechanism.
      - mintplant 5y ago
        They cache it across a geographically-distributed network of edge nodes, even. Potentially very hairy if this had gone south for them.
    - jedberg 5y ago
      If someone ships drugs through UPS, and it sits in a UPS warehouse for a few days, did UPS store drugs? Technically yes, but should they be liable for that?
GaryTang 5y ago
Huge win for the people!
cm2187 5y ago
But surely cloudflare is required to pass on a DMCA takedown notice to the offending website? Otherwise they are acting as a sort of reverse VPN, hiding the website real IP/identity.
- judge2020 5y ago
  > 2. Cloudflare’s security services also do not materially contribute to infringement. From the perspective of a user accessing the infringing websites, these services make no difference. Cloudflare’s security services do impact the ability of third parties to identify a website’s hosting provider and the IP address of the server on which it resides. If Cloudflare’s provision of these services made it more difficult for a third party to report incidents of infringement to the web host as part of an effort to get the underlying content taken down, perhaps it could be liable for contributory infringement. But here, the parties agree that Cloudflare informs complainants of the identity of the host in response to receiving a copyright complaint, in addition to forwarding the complaint along to the host provider. https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.339512/gov.uscourts.cand.339512.151.0.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.33...
- pyuser583 5y ago
  Cloudflare has marketed themselves as “reverse VPN” in the past
dredmorbius 5y ago
The aspect of this case that stands out to me is that copyright is claimed in clothing and fashions: "counterfeit retailers that sell knock-off dresses using the plaintiffs' copyrighted images", a claim traditionally well outside copyright, and at best quite grey. Copyright covers works of original authorship but not either ideas or functional aspects of design. See the strong-IP case from the Copyright Alliance, who can at best muster an "it depends": There are some mixed messages out there about whether fashion designs are eligible for copyright protection. Some experts would say “no,” others would say “yes,” and they’re both right it depends. https://copyrightalliance.org/education/qa-headlines/copyright-fashion-designs/ https://copyrightalliance.org/education/qa-headlines/copyrig... In the US, such protections are still only at the "being considered" stage as best I can tell: The major amendment, of course, would be the extension of design protection to fashion designs, by amending § 1301(a) to provide that “A fashion design is subject to protection under this chapter” and by amending § 1302(b) to include “an article of apparel” in the definition of “useful articles” subject to protection. https://www.copyright.gov/docs/regstat072706.html https://www.copyright.gov/docs/regstat072706.html As the Copyright office's discussion notes, there are non-expressive protections in the specific case of ship hull designs (also in chip masks). But fashion itself has remained largely a copyright-free zone. The proposed language did not enter into US law as evideced at Cornell's USC server: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1301 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1301 Cloudflare has secured this round without challenging the copyrightability of the alleged infinged works themselves, but probably also has that arrow in their quivver should they need to invoke it. The court's decision here is actually a broader protection for Cloudflare (it would apply against any infringement claim), though it doesn't invalidate the plaintiff's IMO questionable fashion-based copyright claims.
- pessimizer 5y ago
  Suppressing knockoffs is often the reason behind (and something hidden within) laws and treaties against counterfeits. Clear knockoffs, whose buyers know they are knockoffs, are not counterfeits any more than Monopoly money is counterfeit currency.
- wmf 5y ago
  Putting aside fashion copyrights, it's a bad sign if a company is using somebody else's photos of somebody else's products to sell their knockoffs. They deserve to get nuked.
mshaler 5y ago
Digital vigilantism averted for now.
exabrial 5y ago
Granted, I don't like monopolies, but it should not have to. Right now Cloudflare is well-behaved, but Google was at one point in their history too.
otterley 5y ago
I have to say that I disagree with the holding in this order. Upon receipt of a DMCA infringement claim, CloudFlare could program its edge servers to deny requests to the reported URLs. The fact that they could easily do this (but elect not to) and that if they did, it would probably (but not absolutely) prevent further infringing copies of the content from being made (even if the origin moved elsewhere) is sufficient to convince me that they are potentially liable for contributory infringement. Sometimes you have to work backwards from how the technology works to come to the correct conclusion, but the judge clearly failed to do that here. The fact that such a denial wouldn't necessarily block access to the content at the origin server is irrelevant. Moreover, the holding also inexplicably ignores the fact that many origin servers only allow access to their desired CDN anyway. This is actually a very common configuration to avoid having the origin server being DOSed. If I were the plaintiffs, I would almost certainly appeal this ruling to the 9th Circuit - and after hiring a much better attorney.
- samat 5y ago
  Cloudflare is founded by lawyers. So yes, I guess they have the best lawyers in business and it should be hell to fight them in court.
mattbee 5y ago
The judgment talks about Cloudflare's services in terms of caching, speed, security and so on, but seems to ignore the vital service that Cloudflare provide to shady sites - anonymity. This victory adds to the impression that Cloudflare is a safe front to present content that would be taken down if hosted directly. We understand that a "Front organization" for criminal activity isn't something to tolerate in bricks & mortar businesses - why is it allowed on the internet? So while I don't particularly care for the wrongs of copyright takedowns, Cloudflare (or other US-based edge networks) surely shouldn't become a bulletproof legal shield for any person or company who can hide their origin? (and Cloudflare still extend their services to the booter sites from whose illegal activities they've sold protection from! But that's not important right now...)
- robertlagrant 5y ago
  Don't forget the real front - the physical device and screen that are the real fronts involved. Everything else - internet, caching, web server technology, operating system for web server, etc, is just a middleman.
  - mattbee 5y ago
    Haha exactly, you joke but... If you want a society where it's even possible to take down "low-hanging" content, and where physical enforcement of that takedown might span international boundaries, the legal goalposts sometimes need to move. And I feel like if we don't help move the technical and legal goalposts in a sympathetic manner - like recognising that a caching edge proxy is part of a site's hosting setup - we end up being part of the problem & pushing governments into more draconian solutions. (I'm not sure why the litigants in this case were targeting Cloudflare, but I assumed because they have no other idea who is hosting these infringing sites) So e.g. what does a legislature do if internet architecture has completely hardened towards privacy, such that edge proxies, whois, Facebook or whoever don't allow some visbility into the ultimate owner/publisher of a piece of content? They legislate what they can touch - the manufacture of the devices in our hands and on our laps, or the configuration of the access networks we all have to use.
smoyer 5y ago
One observation that's only become clear to me after reading the judge's opinions in this case is that the legal profession has come a long with in the last ten year with respect to understanding technologies and in recognizing useful analogies to existing case law.
IdontRememberIt 5y ago
For several month we have been facing continuous phishing attacks. The attackers are using cloudflare + Russian registrars + Russian hosting. Can you guess who never cut the service (but other two react very quickly)?
animex 5y ago
So this means Cloudflare can ignore DCMA takedowns?
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  yes, the DMCA safe harbor relies on underlying potential liability to motivate compliance; without it there is no reason to bother. Which is why providers often are more lax about counternotice procedures, because they have already structured user agreements so that they have no liability for an unnecessary takedown, so the safe harbor on the user side doesn't matter. Knowing you aren't liable on the content owner side for particular content means the DMCA takedown process is irrelevant to you.
askbjoernhansen 5y ago
If Cloudflare was an email provider everyone would be blocking them for sending too much spam and not caring about it.

407 points by eastdakota 5y ago

raxxorrax 5y ago

Pretty sensible and important judgement considering how destructive and plentiful wrong DMCA claims alone have been.

nawgz 5y ago

Not a lawyer, but this seems like a good result for the internet.

t-writescode 5y ago
You were downvoted at my time of reading this; but, I have to agree. We constantly talk about how copyright enforcement on memes, etc, would break the internet, and we're constantly yelling about YouTube breaking Fair Use exceptions of copyrighted material, and so on. Cloudflare not being forced to take down content due to claimed copyright infringement seems exactly in line with protecting the internet and freedom of thought and creativity as a whole. I'd love to know why people are against it. They can still choose to take down copyright infringing material, but they're not obligated by power of the gun / legal / monetary / use-of-force rammifications. Edit: disclosure: of course I'm not a lawyer, etc, blah blah.
- 0des 5y ago
  You know cloudflare still chooses arbitrarily to remove sites from their service, right? What we are talking about here is one small sliver of the pie, so while this one thing (piracy) wont get you yanked, your political beliefs will (and have). Cloudflare has great utility that benefits a lot of us, but I think some day we will realize how much this centralization is a tradeoff that hurts the internet as a whole, no matter how cool the people are who work there.
  - strken 5y ago
    The centralisation isn't Cloudflare's fault, it's the consequence of a world where botnets can pump 100gbps at you. What's the trade-off here? They protect you from DDoS attacks and it's great, vs they don't and your site goes down? I don't really understand what's being traded off here.
    - wizzwizz4 5y ago
      They protect you from DDoS attacks, except: • They see – and usually HTTPS MitM, all the traffic. (I trust them not to abuse that… just about.) • When Cloudflare goes down (which it does), lots of stuff goes down at once. Your redundancy is for nothing. • Centralisation of power enables abuse of power; no matter how good you are, you will abuse your power. I (a generally well-meaning person) have relatively little power, so my small abuses basically harm nobody. Cloudflare has massive power, so its small abuses can harm tens of people each. • Their CAPTCHA walls reduce accessibility, discriminate against Tor users, and make Cloudflare-“protected” sites unusable on a wide variety of systems. Since Cloudflare's the only Cloudflare, a webmaster who doesn't like this basically has to lump it.
      - zaphar 5y ago
        All a webmaster who doesn't like it has to do is not use Cloudflare. If you need Cloudflare then you need TLS MiTM and those Captchas and you are glad they exist. If you don't need Cloudflare and don't like them then just don't use them. Like it or not those features exist to fill actual needs from the sites Cloudflare protects.
        wizzwizz4 5y ago
        There are ways to make accessible CAPTCHAs. It's possible to not discriminate against Tor users unless somebody's attacking the site from Tor. Cloudflare does neither of these things. Cloudflare's CAPTCHA is now hCaptcha, which uses Cloudflare. If you want to get an “accessibility token” (or whatever) to bypass the inaccessible CAPTCHAs, you may have to first complete CAPTCHAs.

edude03 5y ago

Happy to hear it.

johnklos 5y ago

They lied to the judge: "[R]emoving material from a cache without removing it from the hosting server would not prevent the direct infringement from occurring," Chhabria wrote. That's just patently untrue. A web site using Cloudflare's services isn't available to the Internet once Cloudflare stops providing services, until the site's hosting is meaningfully reconfigured. You can't say it's just caching, because you can't access the site in any reasonably normal way via any method other than going through Cloudflare. That's just plain old bullshit.

indymike 5y ago
Depends on configuration. Setting up a failover where if the CDN/ cache fails or is removed, the request is routed to a live server is more than possible.
sodality2 5y ago
> That's just patently untrue. Removing it from the cache does nothing except making Cloudflare drop it. If Cloudflare "removes material from their cache" it DOESN'T prevent any infringement, because the request will hit the main server (and possibly Cloudflare will cache it). If cloudflare kicks them off, that's different than just "removing material from the cache" which seems to be what the argument is.
- sodality2 5y ago
  > If cloudflare kicks them off, that's different than just "removing material from the cache" which seems to be what the argument is. Let me add onto this, even w/o Cloudflare, that STILL won't stop infringements, as other CDN's or even no CDN can be used. It just clears Cloudflare of guilt/responsibility they may have.
onion2k 5y ago
As I understand it Cloudflare is essentially a caching proxy. If the site isn't in the cache then Cloudflare fetches it and passes it on, and also saves it in the cache for the subsequent requests. Removing it from the cache will just make every request look like it's the first one.

partiallypro 5y ago

We have a client that had someone make a direct copy of their website, same branding, same everything and put it on a domain running through Cloudflare. We've reached out to Cloudflare to get them to take it down but nothing has been done. You also have a Cloudflare account to file a complaint, which I found to be odd. We're a Cloudflare customer too...but still that shouldn't be a hoop you have to jump through. Now there is this identical phishing site out there that Cloudflare reverse proxies and we can't see who registered the domain or who hosts the site (since Cloudflare masks the IPs.)

henhouse 5y ago
Cloudflare forwards DMCA copyright infringement complaints to the hosting provider, probably automatically to an abuse@ domain that it can detect. I’m not sure if they do the same for any other copyright claims, but they do pass it on to the parties that should be involved.
- adrr 5y ago
  But don't they store the copyrighted content on their servers? It's one thing just to be a transit mechanism it's another thing to store and serve copyrighted material like a hosting a provider.
  - dymk 5y ago
    Well, they don’t _not_ store it - their whole dealio is they cache website content on their servers. Not forever, but they’re not just a transit mechanism.
    - mintplant 5y ago
      They cache it across a geographically-distributed network of edge nodes, even. Potentially very hairy if this had gone south for them.
  - jedberg 5y ago
    If someone ships drugs through UPS, and it sits in a UPS warehouse for a few days, did UPS store drugs? Technically yes, but should they be liable for that?

GaryTang 5y ago

Huge win for the people!

cm2187 5y ago

But surely cloudflare is required to pass on a DMCA takedown notice to the offending website? Otherwise they are acting as a sort of reverse VPN, hiding the website real IP/identity.

judge2020 5y ago
> 2. Cloudflare’s security services also do not materially contribute to infringement. From the perspective of a user accessing the infringing websites, these services make no difference. Cloudflare’s security services do impact the ability of third parties to identify a website’s hosting provider and the IP address of the server on which it resides. If Cloudflare’s provision of these services made it more difficult for a third party to report incidents of infringement to the web host as part of an effort to get the underlying content taken down, perhaps it could be liable for contributory infringement. But here, the parties agree that Cloudflare informs complainants of the identity of the host in response to receiving a copyright complaint, in addition to forwarding the complaint along to the host provider. https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.339512/gov.uscourts.cand.339512.151.0.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.33...
pyuser583 5y ago
Cloudflare has marketed themselves as “reverse VPN” in the past

dredmorbius 5y ago

The aspect of this case that stands out to me is that copyright is claimed in clothing and fashions: "counterfeit retailers that sell knock-off dresses using the plaintiffs' copyrighted images", a claim traditionally well outside copyright, and at best quite grey. Copyright covers works of original authorship but not either ideas or functional aspects of design. See the strong-IP case from the Copyright Alliance, who can at best muster an "it depends": There are some mixed messages out there about whether fashion designs are eligible for copyright protection. Some experts would say “no,” others would say “yes,” and they’re both right it depends. https://copyrightalliance.org/education/qa-headlines/copyright-fashion-designs/ https://copyrightalliance.org/education/qa-headlines/copyrig... In the US, such protections are still only at the "being considered" stage as best I can tell: The major amendment, of course, would be the extension of design protection to fashion designs, by amending § 1301(a) to provide that “A fashion design is subject to protection under this chapter” and by amending § 1302(b) to include “an article of apparel” in the definition of “useful articles” subject to protection. https://www.copyright.gov/docs/regstat072706.html https://www.copyright.gov/docs/regstat072706.html As the Copyright office's discussion notes, there are non-expressive protections in the specific case of ship hull designs (also in chip masks). But fashion itself has remained largely a copyright-free zone. The proposed language did not enter into US law as evideced at Cornell's USC server: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1301 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1301 Cloudflare has secured this round without challenging the copyrightability of the alleged infinged works themselves, but probably also has that arrow in their quivver should they need to invoke it. The court's decision here is actually a broader protection for Cloudflare (it would apply against any infringement claim), though it doesn't invalidate the plaintiff's IMO questionable fashion-based copyright claims.

pessimizer 5y ago
Suppressing knockoffs is often the reason behind (and something hidden within) laws and treaties against counterfeits. Clear knockoffs, whose buyers know they are knockoffs, are not counterfeits any more than Monopoly money is counterfeit currency.
wmf 5y ago
Putting aside fashion copyrights, it's a bad sign if a company is using somebody else's photos of somebody else's products to sell their knockoffs. They deserve to get nuked.

mshaler 5y ago

Digital vigilantism averted for now.

exabrial 5y ago

Granted, I don't like monopolies, but it should not have to. Right now Cloudflare is well-behaved, but Google was at one point in their history too.

otterley 5y ago

I have to say that I disagree with the holding in this order. Upon receipt of a DMCA infringement claim, CloudFlare could program its edge servers to deny requests to the reported URLs. The fact that they could easily do this (but elect not to) and that if they did, it would probably (but not absolutely) prevent further infringing copies of the content from being made (even if the origin moved elsewhere) is sufficient to convince me that they are potentially liable for contributory infringement. Sometimes you have to work backwards from how the technology works to come to the correct conclusion, but the judge clearly failed to do that here. The fact that such a denial wouldn't necessarily block access to the content at the origin server is irrelevant. Moreover, the holding also inexplicably ignores the fact that many origin servers only allow access to their desired CDN anyway. This is actually a very common configuration to avoid having the origin server being DOSed. If I were the plaintiffs, I would almost certainly appeal this ruling to the 9th Circuit - and after hiring a much better attorney.

samat 5y ago
Cloudflare is founded by lawyers. So yes, I guess they have the best lawyers in business and it should be hell to fight them in court.

mattbee 5y ago

The judgment talks about Cloudflare's services in terms of caching, speed, security and so on, but seems to ignore the vital service that Cloudflare provide to shady sites - anonymity. This victory adds to the impression that Cloudflare is a safe front to present content that would be taken down if hosted directly. We understand that a "Front organization" for criminal activity isn't something to tolerate in bricks & mortar businesses - why is it allowed on the internet? So while I don't particularly care for the wrongs of copyright takedowns, Cloudflare (or other US-based edge networks) surely shouldn't become a bulletproof legal shield for any person or company who can hide their origin? (and Cloudflare still extend their services to the booter sites from whose illegal activities they've sold protection from! But that's not important right now...)

robertlagrant 5y ago
Don't forget the real front - the physical device and screen that are the real fronts involved. Everything else - internet, caching, web server technology, operating system for web server, etc, is just a middleman.
- mattbee 5y ago
  Haha exactly, you joke but... If you want a society where it's even possible to take down "low-hanging" content, and where physical enforcement of that takedown might span international boundaries, the legal goalposts sometimes need to move. And I feel like if we don't help move the technical and legal goalposts in a sympathetic manner - like recognising that a caching edge proxy is part of a site's hosting setup - we end up being part of the problem & pushing governments into more draconian solutions. (I'm not sure why the litigants in this case were targeting Cloudflare, but I assumed because they have no other idea who is hosting these infringing sites) So e.g. what does a legislature do if internet architecture has completely hardened towards privacy, such that edge proxies, whois, Facebook or whoever don't allow some visbility into the ultimate owner/publisher of a piece of content? They legislate what they can touch - the manufacture of the devices in our hands and on our laps, or the configuration of the access networks we all have to use.

smoyer 5y ago

One observation that's only become clear to me after reading the judge's opinions in this case is that the legal profession has come a long with in the last ten year with respect to understanding technologies and in recognizing useful analogies to existing case law.

IdontRememberIt 5y ago

For several month we have been facing continuous phishing attacks. The attackers are using cloudflare + Russian registrars + Russian hosting. Can you guess who never cut the service (but other two react very quickly)?

animex 5y ago

So this means Cloudflare can ignore DCMA takedowns?

dragonwriter 5y ago
yes, the DMCA safe harbor relies on underlying potential liability to motivate compliance; without it there is no reason to bother. Which is why providers often are more lax about counternotice procedures, because they have already structured user agreements so that they have no liability for an unnecessary takedown, so the safe harbor on the user side doesn't matter. Knowing you aren't liable on the content owner side for particular content means the DMCA takedown process is irrelevant to you.

askbjoernhansen 5y ago

If Cloudflare was an email provider everyone would be blocking them for sending too much spam and not caring about it.