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Cloudflare Faces Lawsuit For Assisting Pirate Sites (torrentfreak.com)
An anonymous reader shares a TorrentFreak report: In recent months CloudFlare has been called out repeatedly for offering its services to known pirate sites, including The Pirate Bay. These allegations have now resulted in the first lawsuit after adult entertainment publisher ALS Scan filed a complaint against CloudFlare at a California federal court. [...] Copyright holders are not happy with CloudFlare's actions. Just recently, the Hollywood-affiliated group Digital Citizens Alliance called the company out for helping pirate sites to stay online. Adult entertainment outfit ALS Scan agrees and has now become the first dissenter to take CloudFlare to court. In a complaint filed at a California federal court, ALS describes piracy as the greatest threat to its business. The rise of online piracy has significantly hurt the company's profits, they argue, noting that "pirate" sites are not the only problem. "The problems faced by ALS are not limited to the growing presence of sites featuring infringing content, or 'pirate' sites. A growing number of service providers are helping pirate sites thrive by supporting and engaging in commerce with these sites," ALS writes.
Dear ALS Scan,
Stop exploiting women and get a fucking job.
Where is she now ? This chick with Holly Sampson (Zoe at ALS Scan) were my two favorites
Server companies sell servers that these pirates use, sue them also. Computer makers make computers that pirates use so sue them also. Networking companies provide the bandwidth for pirates to trade copyrighted files so sue them also. Hey, all of these things use electricity so let's sue the electric company also!
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
This hearkens back to the mid-late 90's when Spamford Wallace was being courted by one sleazebag ISP after another. As long as he paid them handsomely, they would ignore abuse complaints. Until the blacklists came about. Someone suggested yesterday about resurrecting the Usenet Death Penalty for Cloudflare, because of their blatant protection for sleazy companies (they were talking about the company that is serving malicious ads on Slashot, that do a full page overlay and redirect you to a scam site, of which it's particularly invasive on a mobile device).
Sex work is a noble empowering choice!
Who cares about pirate sites. However their refusal to take down booters and other criminal services because they are for "freedom of speech" *COUGH COUGH* should have lead them to the court a while ago.
That's terrible!
sue linux and MS as they make the os that run on 99.99% of the servers
I looked up ALS Scan and did some research. News of this lawsuit has me sitting here just shaking my fist.
how big is the chance that a judge will NOT say "just go get an injunction against the pirate sites you have a beef with, after that we can discuss whether Cloudflare can still provide services to them"
If I had massive crime on the street I lived on, my responsibility would be to protect myself and my property.
Imagine that during that crime spree a a local business owner told me that a thief (that had robbed the business down the street) hid in my basement and would not leave. If the business owner came over and said "there is a thief hiding in your basement and I want to get him". I would refuse entry. I would tell him to call the police. If I did my own internal investigation and found that a thief might be hiding there, I would also choose to call the police.
However, under no foreseeable circumstances would I let the business owner in to deal with the criminal. Furthermore, if the business owner continuously asked me to check for thieves, it would be a great inconvenience for me. I would tell them to take a hike and call the police if you have real evidence.
If you really think you have a case, get a prosecutor to go after CloudFlare. Until then, CloudFlare has every right to deal with it internally or just ignore the issue.
We have seen companies using the guise of DMCA violations for sabotaging competition, corporate espionage, and more. If I were CloudFlare, I would also do all I could to remain the neutral party and just focus on serving paying customers.
will step in and make sure nothing happens to CloudFlare, their favorite and biggest man-in-the-middle on the Internet. You can imagine what a trove of information they're hoovering up by offering this service, can't you? Do you really think NSA and FBI would let some money-grubbing Hollywood executives obliterate CloudFlare in court?
This is stoopid..
like penthouse says, "no one ddos's us like our selves"
Porn, piracy
really??
clik bait
I think one of the reasons they got targeted is their gateway page which guards against DDOS is in user's face and it is obvious the service is on cloudflare. It isn't so obvious which cloud, if any, is hosting the site.
The problem for them is the Internet which is designed for people to share data.
I would sue The Internet until it went out of business. They should do the same.
Adult entertainment outfit ALS Scan agrees and has now become the first dissenter to take CloudFlare to court.
I hope writing that caused the author as great a headache to write as reading it caused me.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
And don't forget to sue Intel and AMD for running all the software involved, every step of the way from the server to the end user.
If Cloudflare is responsible for all of this stolen porn, I think, just to be fair, the porn industry should be responsible for all costs related to destroyed marriages that were the result of porn.
ALS has found a very unsympathetic defendant to go after. While I think CloudFlare is on the right side of this issue, I was once infected by their captcha. After hours and hours of trying different anti-virus scans that never detected it, the CloudFlare captcha infection stopped. I still to this day don't know how mbam removed CloudFlare, but although the report claimed there was nothing found, I was finally able to visit websites again. If ALS is able to bring up this despicable behavior it will certainly influence the decision.
Sure there is more $$$ is frivolous lawsuits in the US but the biggest pir8 is Baidu and they do not care what a US judge thinks.
The older I get, the more I see how stupid the yo-yo is. I would like to share with you what the yo-yo is:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoyo
Movie studios are guilty of enabling pirates by actually making movies that get pirated; DVD and camcorder makers are guilty for making things that can be used by pirates; network providers are guilty for providing the bandwidth used by pirates, etc...
"You're out of order! You're out of order! The whole trial is out of order! They're out of order!" -- or so I heard somewhere.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Cam whores.
Posting nude selfies for free instead of making all the basement dwellers go to the pay sites for pron.
Have gnu, will travel.
CloudFlare just needs to take the ice bucket challenge. Isn't that the way to fight ALS?
At this point, should I mention that consistently for a long time like 99% of the time one of those captcha/ad puzzles are for Progressive Insurance. So, indirectly, they've paid the cost for me to download JAV and PSX isos. Does that mean they get to be sued? Please say yes! :)
Cloudflare is a giant man in the middle attack happening 24/7/365 all over the internet.
Don' you find it strange they can insert captchas and other pages into what is supposedly a secure connection between you and the website you are visiting? Say, your favorite bitcoin exchange, for example.
That's because the SSL cert was issued for cloudflare's server, not the website server. After that, the traffic between cloudflare and the website may not even be encrypted at all.
But even if it encrypted, it means that cloudflare with its 1000+ employees can view, sniff, log, alter every bit of communication in both directions.
In other words, that little lock icon by the URL in your browser.... completely useless. Because the website has broken your trust by delegating the cert to cloudflare.
Remind me again why people seem to think this is a good thing...
Ask for anti porn legislation.