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Cloudflare: We Can't Shut Down Pirate Sites (torrentfreak.com)
CloudFlare has said it cannot shut down piracy websites. The CloudFlare's response comes two months after adult entertainment outfit ALS Scan filed a complaint at a California federal court two months ago in which the company accused the CDN service of various counts of copyright and trademark infringement. From a TorrentFreak report:"CloudFlare is not the operator of the allegedly infringing sites but is merely one of the many intermediaries across the internet that provide automated CDN services, which result in the websites in question loading a bit faster than they would if they did not utilize CDN services." If Cloudflare terminated the accounts of allegedly infringing websites, the sites themselves would still continue to exist. It would just require a simple DNS reconfiguration to continue their operation. "Indeed, there are no measures of any kind that CloudFlare could take to prevent this alleged infringement, because the termination of CloudFlare's CDN services would have no impact on the existence and ability of these allegedly infringing websites to continue to operate," Cloudflare writes. As such, the company argues that it's not "materially contributing" to any of the alleged copyright infringements.
And put 'em up against it! They're thieving pirates! Remember when we used to hang pirates! Damned SJWs won't let us hang pirates any more!
Set your default gateway to 127.0.0.1, this is a free service that blocks all attacks from CDN providers.
It’s unfortunate how many businesses still treat them as a legitimate CDN. We have an A/V vendor that does sig updates through Cloudflare. Tough to block their IP’s...
I think CloudFlare's comments are accurate, but I'm no expert.
I'm getting sick & tired of this new mindset that everything in the world is less important than US corporate copyright.
Wins the shittest defence ever award.
Continuing to do business with with sites knowingly infringing copyright? You guys deserve to get a smackdown by a judge.
there are no measures of any kind that CloudFlare could take to prevent this alleged infringement, because the termination of CloudFlare's CDN services would have no impact on the existence and ability of these allegedly infringing websites to continue to operate,"
The exact same argument could be made for hosting torrents; if you don't stop every "seeder", a torrent will still be shared. I don't expect the judge will buy this argument but strangers things have happened.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
I use CloudFlare and I think they are great. Should I use an alternate DNS provider? I have about 30 entries. I am certainly NOT going to use Cox cable!
DMCA sucks.
It would even be difficult to almost impossible to shut down a site that set itself up as an onion site, operated on freenode, or was based around i2p. And if none of those are good options one could probably also just setup operations in a country that doesn't respect copy"right".
The question that we need to ask our selves is why *anybody* should be required to proper up a dying business model. The government may not even be entitled to shut down (even if they do) web sites under a number of different legal reasonings: including prior restraint isn't legal as far as free speech is concerned. Then on the basis that one can't be obliged to go out of its way to assist. It would be one thing if a business already has such systems setup, but the government, in the US can't order a company write software or develop anything to help government.
If you don't like copy"right" and are against laws that have no victims come join the 20,000 movers to New Hampshire where we have multiple and diverse groups, all migrating for liberty. We want to end copy"right" (NHexit, NH independence), drivers licenses, social security, government schools, open the boarders, end state police (we didn't have it until recently in NH history), etc:
http://www.freestateproject.org/ http://www.freekeene.com/ http://www.shiresociety.com/ http://www.freetalklive.com/
Can you explain how you are attacked by CF ip addresses? I'm a CF customer but can't see how CF could attack you.
You can be complicit even if you don't pull the trigger.
CloudFlare, I love you, but quit trying to weasel out of your responsibilities to respond to abuse complaints.
Damn! They just admitted that they are irrelevant.
It can't. OP is either a troll or doesn't know the difference between a hosting provider and a CDN.
Some people have beenspoofing their ips as an attempt to hide while doing attacks.
shut off service to the pirate sites (under court order, for legal cover) for a week and see what happens.
.
That's what it looks like to me.
For standing up and admitting that it won't MAKE ANY DIFFERENCE.
Imaginary Property can not be defended in any way. You want to control the distribution of content - stop producing it.
1. Run script blocker. 2. selectively enable CDNs. 3. Free porn!
Or so I've been told. :). Needless to say, cheap wankers don't make them happy.
The sites will exist without them and they're not taking them offline, they're just making them harder to find.
The sites are still accessible via IP even without the DNS and it's not their job to police the internet. While we can make reasonable guesses in some cases, the fact that IP rightsholders have put out phony "leaked" content (and even DMCA'd themselves) remains, so NO ONE but the copyright holder has any idea who they've actually given permission to. And in some cases, even the copyright holder is too dumb to figure that out. Feel free to go read the YouTube case if you want cites on that. Slashdot covered it quite extensively, including the part where they had to go back to the court and remove some "infringing" materials they themselves had posted. Twice. After extensive legal review.
So no, I cannot, will not, and do not condone shifting this burden and putting an impossible standard on services to police content that isn't theirs. This will only fuel injustice when the favored get away with breaking laws and the disfavored get busted because the law itself creates a standard that cannot truly be met because it relies on knowledge that the services cannot and do not have about the contents of the copyright holder's mind.
Thus, I quite vociferously disagree with you both regarding the technical and philosophical sections of this argument.
No I haven't. Not being some TLA agent who needs to know the enemy, I have no reason to.
But I agree that CloudFlare just needs to stop being a CDN. Let only facebook and twitter exist. And let them only allow posts about your meal or your cat through, but only if the meal is not a cat. It will solve everything! Also physicists just need to stop making explosions possible. It's simple! No more terrorism and no more theft of porn.
Anybody who says either of those things are impossible or overblown is clearly a big fat dummy.
Obviously the people downloading find some value in what they're downloading. And they're not compensating the rightful owners, who legally have the right to decide who they sell to in the first place, the price, terms, etc. You want an open society with no rules? Good luck getting any contract enforced.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
d n s
I've been getting spam from those fuckers for several months as work.
Presumptuous sales assholes assuming I want to set up an meeting, and when I don't respond to them they assume that I missed/lossed their email.
Fuck-em.
Many spammers use Cloudflare to shield their web sites from being taken down. Even when abuse@cloudflare.com is presented with overwhelming evidence they are protecting spammers, they do nothing. I can only assume they believe it is more profitable for them to ignore the takedown requests than spend money taking care of the problem.
the rightful owners, who legally have the right to decide who they sell to in the first place
I don't understand how refusing to sell at any price (e.g. Song of the South) fulfills copyright's purpose: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts".
"Dying business model?" excuse me, there are pirates of indie content, even content you can get for free. People just steal for shits and giggles, and a smaller portion of pirates make a business out of it. Have you ever seen the kind of bullshit invasive advertisements on pirate sites? Someone is making money or they wouldn't be operating. So Cloudflare is certainly making money of pirates.
If they were a real CDN, customers publishing copyrighted content would violate the TOS and they would be turned off. The fact that they can't be bothered is a sign that they are willing to deal with anyone with a few bucks. If they do have terms that would allow them to turn off customers like this and they don't enforce them it is even worse.
My default gateway already is 127.0.0.1, you insensitive clod!
The town that provides streets that help burglars to come to visit my house is helping them far too much for my taste ;-)
Can you explain how you are attacked by CF ip addresses? I'm a CF customer but can't see how CF could attack you.
Hackers must be spoofing their addresses so they look like they come from Cloudflare. People don't want to block Cloudflare so that makes them harder to filter.
No sig today...
Indeed. Once a wrong-doer using their services is identified, CloudFare — and all other enablers, including the ISP — can be expected to stop the enabling.
Unless, of course, you don't think, the "alleged pirates" are doing anything wrong, do you?
Yeah, there is no point in vegetarianism: if I don't eat this steak, somebody else would. And a great defense for a contract killer too — if I haven't shot this guy, they would've hired someone else to kill him.
A week ago you were defending boycott of Mozilla over Brendan Eich's "homophobia" — now you are claiming, a boycott can not be effective?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Have you ever seen the kind of bullshit invasive advertisements on pirate sites?
Nah, I use an ad blocker. If you're gonna freeload you may as well do it hardcore.
Doesn't have to, same as 2nd amendment freaks argue that the "militia" part has nothing to do with anyone else's right to bear arms. Go argue with the NRA and the Supreme Court. The portion of a law that describes the purpose is irrelevant to the granting actual rights granted in the law. It could have read "To promote wooden shoes" for all it matters.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Is current law worth keeping on the books if it fails to benefit the public?
Copyright law still benefits people. There'd be no GPL without it. Also, without copyright laws there;d be far more draconian DRM. Remember back in the days wiith custom floppies with laser burns that couldn't be copied without both a PC Tools option board (special floppy controller) and software that would allow the board to maintain a copy of the unreadable bits and return errors when those bad ones were read, or when they would intercept write requests and return just the bits that were readable on the original floppy?
Heck, I did something similar with a needle - just pierce a hole at random, then figure out which sectors are unreadable in my original. If you could read them, the floppy was not an original. And since it was at random, no two disks were alike. Writing data to the original wasn't a big deal - once you knew where the bad sectors were, skip over them.
Is it breakable? Of course. Would the average person be able to? Of course not.
People who create works have the right to decide, within the limitations of the law, how they are used. That includes how they are sold, licensed, or whatever. Without that incentive, most of the stuff you experience (books, music, movies and tv shows, professional sports broadcasts, most radio and tv stations - wouldn't exist. TV wouldn't exist as we know it today because there wouldn't be much worth watching on it - same as almost all the stuff on youtube is crap. Most of the decent games are possible because copyright makes it financially viable to develop them. You might not like patented medicines, but without those patents, and the chance to make money off of drugs, the research won't get done and they won't get put through the testing and production phases.
As just one recent example, look at the self-driving car craze. Without a financial profit motive, nobody would be developing one. That financial profit is made possible because you can recoup the money invested via sales, without having to compete with someone who didn't have to spend to develop one, just ripped of your design and sold it for less (because they can afford to without the sunk costs you incurred).
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Copyright law still benefits people.
Overall it does. In some specific situations, it does not. One category of these is a copyright owner deliberately keeping a previously published or publicly exhibited work out of print everywhere or in particular countries. An example of this is Song of the South. Another is uncertainty over whether a song you've written is legally original, as opposed to an accidental infringement of copyright in someone else's song. An example of this is "My Sweet Lord" by George Harrison. Why are those specific cases worth keeping?
Heck, I did something similar with a needle - just pierce a hole at random, then figure out which sectors are unreadable in my original. If you could read them, the floppy was not an original. And since it was at random, no two disks were alike. Writing data to the original wasn't a big deal - once you knew where the bad sectors were, skip over them.
Nintendo GameCube disc authentication works the same way: burn six evenly spaced pinholes in the lead-in at some random theta, and then mark in the Burst Cutting Area which sectors were burned.
"My Sweet Lord" was such an obvious rip-off that I'm amazed that absolutely nobody around him said "Hey, you can't do that!" The first time I heard it I recognized it as a rip-off of "He's So Fine" long before the song finished - and I'm not a music fanatic. Harrison got nailed, and he deserved it.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
What steps should a songwriter take to prevent a similar mistake?
There is no way that nobody around him didn't recognize the similarity. Why nobody called him out on it (or if they did, were ignored) is the question when it comes to prevention.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.