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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.
Let me repeat what I said in the last article about safe harbor provisions. The entire premise behind copyright is that by granting an artificial temporary monopoly, it fosters the creation of more value in creative works than the market left alone would foster. In other words, the economy as a whole has more productive activity (makes more money) with copyright than without. The moment the cost of enforcing copyright exceeds the economic benefit of copyright, that premise is no longer true, and the rationale for copyright existing vanishes.
Safe harbor provisions exist to insure that this condition of copyright's existence is not violated. Safe harbors make sure the cost of enforcing copyright is borne by the entities benefiting from copyright. The IP holder is making money off copyright. If they're also responsible for paying for enforcement of copyright, then it becomes a simple subtraction problem. If the amount of money they make from copyright exceeds the cost of enforcing copyright, then it's worth having copyright. If the cost of enforcing it exceeds the money they're making, then the entire rationale upon which copyright is based is no longer true, and the economy would be better off simply eliminating copyright.
If the IP companies are allowed to eliminate safe harbor provisions and shift the cost of enforcing copyright onto other companies, then this subtraction is no longer so simple. The profit shows up in one entity, the costs show up in another. We could wind up in a situation where copyright is a drag on the economy (enforcement costs exceed economic benefit), but we'll never know it because the profit goes to the IP companies while the enforcement cost is borne by the ISPs and data services companies.
If the IP companies want ISPs and data services companies to enforce copyright, the proper way to do it is for them to pay for enforcement. This will result in the market determining the cost of enforcement. Couple this with the market determining the value of selling copyrighted material, and the annual account balance of the IP companies automatically tells us whether copyright is still worth it, or whether technology has made copyright economically unfeasible.