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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.
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.
Which is why safe harbor rules were made. This doesn't just affect CloudFlare, but any site that takes user content. Even Slashdot. Suppose I were to type a few dozen pages of text into my comment that happened to be from a copyrighted book. That could be a copyright violation and Slashdot might be sued. However, maybe the text comes from my own book which I own the copyright to. Or maybe the author placed the book in the public domain so anyone can post it online. How would Slashdot be able to identify that the text is copyrighted and whether the poster is able to upload said text. For a very large organization, this might be difficult but doable. For smaller companies (or hobbyist websites), it would be impossible and they'd find themselves one lawsuit away from being shut down - even if the lawsuit was groundless.
This is why we have safe harbor (possibly the only good part of the DMCA). If the RIAA/MPAA spot a pirate site using CloudFlare's service, they send a DMCA notice to CloudFlare. CloudFlare turns off the service and sends the notice to the site. If the site challenges the DMCA notice, CloudFlare turns their access back on. Then, it's a legal battle between the RIAA/MPAA and the site accused of piracy. CloudFlare is completely out of it (unless the court orders them to turn off access for good).
The MPAA/RIAA wants websites to be the piracy police so that they don't have to do any work. They want the benefits of the DMCA without any of the "costs" (needing to seek out copyright violations). It's pure laziness coupled with greed.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
So... they're unions of corporations?
In my country we call those "cartels".
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.