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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.
Former 8 year ISP employee:
Yes, after they've been informed of it. That's the entire point of the safe harbor laws. You don't have to be proactive; you *do* have to respond once you've been notified that there's a problem -- or facilitate the challenging of the notice -- otherwise you're aiding and abetting.
In this case, CloudFlare is full of shit. "They're just a customer of ours!" is no excuse whatsoever. By accepting money in exchange for their HTTP proxying services, they're in a commercial transaction and are profiting from the endeavor. If they continue to use this line of defense, I hope they get sued.