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Cloudflare Wants to Eliminate 'Moot' Pirate Site Blocking Threat (torrentfreak.com)
Cloudflare is not happy with the RIAA's efforts to hold the company liable for pirate websites on its network. From a report: Representing various major record labels, the RIAA filed a lawsuit against MP3Skull in 2015. Last year a Florida federal court sided with the RIAA, awarding the labels more than $22 million in damages. In addition, it issued a permanent injunction which allowed the RIAA to take over the site's domain names. Despite the multi-million dollar verdict, MP3Skull continued to operate using a variety of new domain names, which were subsequently targeted by the RIAA's legal team. As the site refused to shut down, the RIAA eventually moved up the chain targeting CDN provider Cloudflare with the permanent injunction. The RIAA argued that Cloudflare was operating "in active concert or participation" with the pirates. Cloudflare objected and argued that the DMCA shielded the company from the broad blocking requirements. However, the court ruled that the DMCA doesn't apply in this case, opening the door to widespread anti-piracy filtering. The court stressed that, before issuing an injunction against Cloudflare, it still had to be determined whether the CDN provider is "in active concert or participation" with the pirate site. [...] Cloudflare now wants the dangerous anti-piracy filtering order to be thrown out. The company submitted a motion to vacate the order late last week, arguing that the issue is moot. In fact, it has been for a while for some of the contended domain names. The CDN provider says it researched the domain names listed in the injunction and found that only three of the twenty domains used Cloudflare's services at the time the RIAA asked the court to clarify its order. Some had never used CloudFlare's services at all, they say.
"The CDN provider says it researched the domain names listed in the injunction and found that only three of the twenty domains used Cloudflare's services at the time the RIAA asked the court to clarify its order. Some had never used CloudFlare's services at all, they say." This seems grounds for contempt of court / sanctions on lawyers involved, wasting courts time with spurious crap they didn't even both to do due diligence on before asking for injunctions against non-events.
Christopher Poole has gone into hiding.
Reading the article, it turns out that it wasn't just moot on account of none of the domains still being with CloudFlare at the time of the RIAA's request for an injunction against CloudFlare, it was also the case that 7 of the 20 domains were owned by Sony, a member of the RIAA, at the time the request was made. If you already own a third of the domains because of a prior court order, there's nothing "urgent" about your "emergency" request for an injunction.
Shameless.
I would think then, it is apparent that Sony is behind the pirating, and Cloudflare should pro-actively remove any and all links to any site that is owned by Sony.