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Cloudflare Doesn't Want To Become the 'Piracy Police' (torrentfreak.com)
Cloudflare is warning that far-reaching cooperation between copyright holders and internet services may put innovation in danger. From a report: As one of the leading CDN and DDoS protection services, Cloudflare is used by millions of websites across the globe. This includes thousands of "pirate" sites, including the likes of The Pirate Bay and ExtraTorrent, which rely on the U.S.-based company to keep server loads down. Copyright holders are not happy that CloudFlare services these sites. Last year, the RIAA and MPAA called the company out for aiding copyright infringers and helping pirate sites to obfuscate their actual location. [...] In a whitepaper, Cloudflare sees this trend as a worrying development. The company points out that the safe harbor provisions put in place by the DMCA and Europe's eCommerce Directive have been effective in fostering innovation for many years. Voluntary "anti-piracy" agreements may change this. [...] Cloudflare argues that increased monitoring and censorship are not proper solutions. Third-party Internet services shouldn't be pushed into the role of Internet police out of a fear of piracy. Instead, the company cautions against far-reaching voluntary agreements that may come at the expense of the public.
They clearly want to keep making money off of those sites. That's all.
That would cut way into profits if they had to vet everything. Similar to Youtube, they would rather not curate anything.
But, Cloudflare will eventually be forced to, or they will have to give up their logs so a third party can do it.
Download what you can while you can! The Wild West of the internet is ending.
Media companies are making bigger profits than ever, with no signs of it slowing down. Why are they so concerned about the tiny amount of piracy taking place?
1) Most piracy is done by teenagers and people who are broke and cannot afford to watch content legitimately anyway.
2) Piracy is a pain in the ass. Paying a few dollars for content is far easier, so that's what most people will do.
If they want to reduce piracy further, the best way is to make watching content as easy and simple as possible. For example, FOX recently yanked a bunch of their shows from Netflix because they're starting their own streaming service. Most people don't want to pay for multiple streaming services! Their greed is probably going to result in more piracy, as people go "Damnit Firefly is no longer on Netflix. I'm just going to torrent the rest of the episodes." So now instead of making some money, they make none.
And despite all this, like I mentioned earlier, the industry is more profitable than ever. They're basically yelling "THE SKY IS FALLING!!" on a clear, calm day with blue skies and sunshine.
..stop the signal, Mal.
>> Cloudflare Doesn't Want To Become the 'Piracy Police'
But they will for a price.
In other news, I didn't want to go to work this week, but I decided I would so I could continue to feed my family.
They just have to respond to takedown requests of illegal content in a timely fashion. Just like their precious Safe Harbor provisions require.
They just dump your data out at random in a way that gets cached in Google, so someone else can investigate your piracy.
You don't even
The media companies are the lazy ones. They want someone else to do all the work for them.
When someone commits a tort against you, you hire your own lawyer and pay for your own investigation and court costs. You could sue the defendant to cover those costs, but you don't get to force third parties to foot the bill.
They go after ISPs and hosting companies because they're big and have deep pockets, unlike the pirates themselves.
Yelling at whoever's nearby when the problem isn't is something children and stunted adults do.
Yelling at an irrelevant person when your car is towed. No, I don't mean literal "yelling", use your brain.
Yelling at an employee when the vendor did something wrong.
Yelling at the police when some teenager vandalized your stuff.
Yelling at whoever you CAN find when your target is ghosts.
I'm being nice to assume they're incompetent, since the alternative is being knowingly wrong outright. I imagine it's lawyers who will get flak from above if they aren't seen doing something, so much like a web browser shuffling the GUI around because an art developer wants his paycheck, here's a bunch of meetings and phone calls with cloudflare even though the actual effects on piracy will be between zero and fuck all. Because it's billable hours, because it looks nice on your quarterly report, because you can then tell studios "we prevented 100 billion dollars of losses. raise plz."
It's a scaled up version of typing loudly when the boss walks by.
Tell that to the Post Office, or UPS and Fedex.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
They obviously arent buying the right politicians. I mean they arent donating to the right campaigns
Are the RIAA and MPAA planning DDoS attacks on websites that they can't take down by legal means?
Except that every time CloudFlare has been notified, they have disabled the content that they were notified about, as required by the DMCA, unless you have evidence that they are not complying with the DMCA (which the MPAA and RIAA don't or they'd have marched straight to the courthouse to put an end to it rather than paying people to whine about it online).
Look, I get it, the MPAA/RIAA bribed the fuck out of the Democrats to get the DMCA and now you feel like the law they bought isn't working and they should get a refund. But guess what! It's the law until it's replaced.
Now, the question is whether you think you can replace the law with one where they should use psychic power to determine whether or not a given file would be found to be infringing by a court and block that file if so. If you think a law like that is going to fly, well, I'm sure the Democrats have their donation slots WIDE open for 2018.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
You don't know because you haven't and can't verify every uploader and every downloader (the people, not the IPs), any promotions or private contracts from the copyright holder, and the laws in every country and county the uploader, downloader, and copyright holder are in. It's legal for people to put their own content into torrents and let people download them. Even the media companies have sometimes released things over torrents (and then they send themselves takedown notices and occasionally sue themselves).
If you can figure out how to do all that, I'm sure the media companies are willing to give you a low paying job for a year before you're laid off. (Don't forget, the entire industry was built on privacy. Hollywood exists because the media companies ran to the west coast to be out of reach of the east cost's patent and copyright laws)
For no reason of copyright, I block some cloudflare address ranges in my router, because I was getting persistent hack attempts from them. My tolerance for that sort of thing is low. Never might the piracy, it's the script kiddies & other ne'er do wells that I want to see shut down.
When it's all set up next week I'll have an open WiFi for whoever needs it, a TOR server to help push that system. And I appreciate what cloudflare is doing.
There should not be just one company doing the whole internet's caching. Make it an easy target for censoring loving types.
Tell everyone you'll be taking a week off to upgrade your servers. See what the copyright holders think after a week of being DDOSed by angry script kiddies...
People and organizations that create and distribute IP almost always legitimately earn and report income. This is because it all goes through banks and can be audited. Sure there can be "hollywood accounting" - but the average person working on the creation of intellectual property earns an income and this income is taxed. Piracy reduces that tax take because it reduces the income made from the creation of material. With automation taking almost every type of job except the creative ones, is it much of a surprise that governments have decided to step in to protect one area of the economy that will be difficult to automate?
by your argument toll roads are liable for stolen cars traveling their road. you're an idiot.