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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.
That would cut way into profits if they had to vet everything. Similar to Youtube, they would rather not curate anything.
Download what you can while you can! The Wild West of the internet is ending.
The Wild West of the internet has been ending for about 20 years now, but it's still alive and kicking.
The Wild West of the internet is ending.
Only while we remain tethered to the ISP. Some day, hopefully, the internet will become truly P2P, where no one can interfere
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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.
>> 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.
Of reversal of fortune? Never!
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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.
Only while we remain tethered to the ISP. Some day, hopefully, the internet will become truly P2P, where no one can interfere
Right. The special irony here is that CloudFlare benefits from the massive centralization of the Internet that its creators hoped to avoid but the regulators have seen to.
A decentralized acceleration engine would have your neighbor down the street holding his recent copy of a website asset and your computer would find it with a proximity-sensitive and cryptographically-secure DHT algorithm and pull it from there. That would be cheaper for everybody involved, even if that request netted your neighbor a micro-satoshi.
In the real world, the ISP's ban any such "servers" and the PUC's protect them from competition, so we have CloudFlares who work to get one of their caches as close to you as possible.
Between the **AA and CloudFlare, it's still no contest who the good guys are.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
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.
I let you in on a secret: No one can interfere.
But we learned from our earlier mistakes. We don't tell the masses how to do this. That way the corporations think that they say where the content goes.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
The "wild west" was always moving. Westwards. Frontier never stays as frontier - after a while towns would get bigger, sheriffs would get access to more resources, and it would no longer be possible for an outlaw to shoot a few people in the middle of town then ride out again in safety. The internet, too, is always moving - the havens of copyright infringement get closed down, and occasionally a whole distribution system may get wiped out, but there is always somewhere new they can go. Bulletin boards gave way to usenet binaries, gave way to FTP dumps, gave way to websites, gave way to the first crude p2p file sharing in Napster, gave way to the fully- or partially-distributed services that followed.
In the real world, the ISP's ban any such "servers" and the PUC's protect them from competition
Which is why I said they are weakest link, the tyrants. Everything depends on getting around them.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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.
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?