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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.
It would take teams of lawyers to verify that all the content that goes through their service is either fair use, the entity has rights, or is the rights holder. Not everything infringing is a torrent and not every torrent is infringing it's also used for backing up/syncing files and software updates. Cost aside there are already plenty of false positives and rights holders that have been harassed with take down notices by riaa or companies that use some flaky algorithm to determine infringement. Cloudflare and any other service can't have the reputation of being the one making false accusations based on a bad algorithm.
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.