[HN Gopher] Cloudflare doesn't have to cut off copyright-infring...
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Cloudflare doesn't have to cut off copyright-infringing websites,
judge rules
Author : eastdakota
Score : 147 points
Date : 2021-10-07 19:39 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| GaryTang wrote:
| Huge win for the people!
| nawgz wrote:
| Not a lawyer, but this seems like a good result for the internet.
| t-writescode wrote:
| You were downvoted at my time of reading this; but, I have to
| agree. We constantly talk about how copyright enforcement on
| memes, etc, would break the internet, and we're constantly
| yelling about YouTube breaking Fair Use exceptions of
| copyrighted material, and so on.
|
| Cloudflare _not_ being forced to take down content due to
| claimed copyright infringement seems exactly in line with
| protecting the internet and freedom of thought and creativity
| as a whole.
|
| I'd love to know why people are against it.
|
| They can still _choose_ to take down copyright infringing
| material, but they 're not obligated by power of the gun /
| legal / monetary / use-of-force rammifications.
|
| Edit: disclosure: of course I'm not a lawyer, etc, blah blah.
| 0des wrote:
| You know cloudflare still chooses arbitrarily to remove sites
| from their service, right? What we are talking about here is
| one small sliver of the pie, so while this one thing (piracy)
| wont get you yanked, your political beliefs will (and have).
|
| Cloudflare has great utility that benefits a lot of us, but I
| think some day we will realize how much this centralization
| is a tradeoff that hurts the internet as a whole, no matter
| how cool the people are who work there.
| strken wrote:
| The centralisation isn't Cloudflare's fault, it's the
| consequence of a world where botnets can pump 100gbps at
| you.
|
| What's the trade-off here? They protect you from DDoS
| attacks and it's great, vs they don't and your site goes
| down? I don't really understand what's being traded off
| here.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| They protect you from DDoS attacks, except:
|
| * They see - and usually HTTPS MitM, all the traffic. (I
| trust them not to abuse that... just about.)
|
| * When Cloudflare goes down (which it does), lots of
| stuff goes down at once. Your redundancy is for nothing.
|
| * Centralisation of power enables abuse of power; no
| matter how good you are, you _will_ abuse your power. I
| (a _generally_ well-meaning person) have relatively
| little power, so my small abuses basically harm nobody.
| Cloudflare has massive power, so its small abuses can
| harm tens of people each.
|
| * Their CAPTCHA walls reduce accessibility, discriminate
| against Tor users, and make Cloudflare-"protected" sites
| unusable on a wide variety of systems. Since Cloudflare's
| the only Cloudflare, a webmaster who doesn't like this
| basically has to lump it.
| edude03 wrote:
| Happy to hear it.
| partiallypro wrote:
| We have a client that had someone make a direct copy of their
| website, same branding, same everything and put it on a domain
| running through Cloudflare. We've reached out to Cloudflare to
| get them to take it down but nothing has been done. You also have
| a Cloudflare account to file a complaint, which I found to be
| odd. We're a Cloudflare customer too...but still that shouldn't
| be a hoop you have to jump through. Now there is this identical
| phishing site out there that Cloudflare reverse proxies and we
| can't see who registered the domain or who hosts the site (since
| Cloudflare masks the IPs.)
| akersten wrote:
| You (your client) can still subpoena Cloudflare for the
| customer's IP if you can get a court to agree that it's
| infringement and then go after the upstream host. That's seems
| like a solution compatible with this ruling, and an appropriate
| amount of lift.
| ohazi wrote:
| This really doesn't seem like Cloudflare's problem.
|
| Did banks sue the Ford dealer for selling big V8 getaway cars
| to bank robbers? Or the city for operating the roads that they
| used to get away? Or the toll collector for letting the bank
| robbers cross a bridge after they paid the toll?
|
| No, because any of those things would have been ridiculous.
|
| At some point we as a society are going to have to get off this
| intellectual property high horse.
|
| Maybe we should stop trying to protect things that are easy to
| copy like website designs and wedding dresses. The enormous
| effort to try and protect these things damages society more
| than the benefit that even a successful outcome might have for
| a rights holder.
| pfundstein wrote:
| That's a flawed analogy, cloudflare here provides cover for
| these dodgy sites to hide behind. Cloudflare here is not only
| the V8 supercar but the getaway driver as well.
| noahtallen wrote:
| So in that case, wouldn't the right way to handle it be to
| get a warrant to have Cloudflare give you the identity so
| that they can be prosecuted under copyright law? And if
| there is no law being broken, Cloudflare doesn't have a
| responsibility to do anything. You wouldn't want a company
| to reveal your identity just because someone asked nicely.
| You'd want a judge to approve a warrant.
| dymk wrote:
| A Ford dealership would be liable for selling counterfeit
| Fords, or at least would be responsible for helping track
| down where that counterfeit came from.
| 0des wrote:
| dymk, while you prompted this post, this has nothing to do
| with you, so ear muff it for a sec if you don't mind.
|
| If I may briefly stand on my soapbox: I'm starting to think
| analogies _never_ help prove a point. No matter how
| relevant or true they might be, someone will pull some
| comparison out of the _analogy_ and use that to detract
| from the main point being compared and expect that
| comparison to be a valid rebuttal, often to great popular
| success. Anybody else notice this?
| dymk wrote:
| Absolutely. My post is really making a meta point about
| the analogies I see here. You can make an analogy that
| makes any point you want if you stretch it enough.
|
| Fight bad analogies with bad analogies. Show off how
| useless a tool they are.
| chc wrote:
| When used well, analogies aren't meant to prove a point,
| they're to illustrate a point. It is actually useful for
| two people to offer different analogies that they think
| are appropriate, because it helps to show their point of
| view. What is useless is treating an analogy as though it
| had the force of argument.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Cloudflare's not selling the website. Is the Ford
| dealership liable when you show up at their door, ask how
| to get to 1308 Halifax, they direct you there, and then the
| people at 1308 Halifax sell you a counterfeit Ford?
|
| Is the landlord at 1308 Halifax liable when his tenants
| sell someone a counterfeit Ford?
| jaytaylor wrote:
| ..otherwise Ford will hurt financially?
|
| This is not a comparable analogy, CF isn't selling each
| website you visit.
|
| They are providing Privacy and Security via 100% automated
| tools.
|
| Perhaps take it up with the registrar, or file a lawsuit
| against CF and the Reg and get a court ordered TakeDown.
| There are avenues of resolution for such disputes, if one
| is passionate enough to exercise them.
| [deleted]
| partiallypro wrote:
| > Maybe we should stop trying to protect things that are easy
| to copy like website designs and wedding dresses.
|
| Right, but the website is being used to scam customers and
| steal their information. So, that's not even the same thing.
| It's like Cloudflare protecting people that send out spam
| phishing emails that look like PayPal, etc. It's not just
| because the site was copied outright, though that's bad
| enough. It's about tricking customers entirely. It's
| literally fraud.
| dpifke wrote:
| Crimes should be investigated by law enforcement, not
| Cloudflare.
|
| Cloudflare is not Batman.
|
| (Edit to add: yes, I'm aware law enforcement is often
| useless when it comes to cybercrime. But that's what we
| need to fix, rather than encouraging private companies to
| act as vigilantes.)
| Causality1 wrote:
| What due process do you believe Cloudflare should implement
| with regards to claims that a particular site on their service
| deserves to be booted?
| markdown wrote:
| DMCA?
| brundolf wrote:
| Could that be treated as a trademark issue rather than a
| copyright issue?
| henhouse wrote:
| Cloudflare forwards DMCA copyright infringement complaints to
| the hosting provider, probably automatically to an abuse@
| domain that it can detect. I'm not sure if they do the same for
| any other copyright claims, but they do pass it on to the
| parties that should be involved.
| adrr wrote:
| But don't they store the copyrighted content on their
| servers? It's one thing just to be a transit mechanism it's
| another thing to store and serve copyrighted material like a
| hosting a provider.
| dymk wrote:
| Well, they don't _not_ store it - their whole dealio is
| they cache website content on their servers. Not forever,
| but they're not just a transit mechanism.
| jedberg wrote:
| If someone ships drugs through UPS, and it sits in a UPS
| warehouse for a few days, did UPS store drugs? Technically
| yes, but should they be liable for that?
| markdown wrote:
| > You also have a Cloudflare account to file a complaint, which
| I found to be odd. We're a Cloudflare customer too...but still
| that shouldn't be a hoop you have to jump through.
|
| I was once locked out of my Cloudflare account, and I couldn't
| contact them because to do so... required an account /*
| facepalm */
|
| FYI, the way around this is to send an email to
| support@cloudflare.com. This isn't mentioned anywhere on the
| public-facing website.
|
| A truly bizarre way to treat paying customers.
| johnklos wrote:
| They lied to the judge:
|
| "[R]emoving material from a cache without removing it from the
| hosting server would not prevent the direct infringement from
| occurring," Chhabria wrote.
|
| That's just patently untrue.
|
| A web site using Cloudflare's services isn't available to the
| Internet once Cloudflare stops providing services, until the
| site's hosting is meaningfully reconfigured.
|
| You can't say it's just caching, because you can't access the
| site in any reasonably normal way via any method other than going
| through Cloudflare. That's just plain old bullshit.
| indymike wrote:
| Depends on configuration. Setting up a failover where if the
| CDN/ cache fails or is removed, the request is routed to a live
| server is more than possible.
| sodality2 wrote:
| > That's just patently untrue.
|
| Removing it from the cache does nothing except making
| Cloudflare drop it. If Cloudflare "removes material from their
| cache" it DOESN'T prevent any infringement, because the request
| will hit the main server (and possibly Cloudflare will cache
| it).
|
| If cloudflare _kicks them off_ , that's different than just
| "removing material from the cache" which seems to be what the
| argument is.
| onion2k wrote:
| As I understand it Cloudflare is essentially a caching proxy.
| If the site isn't in the cache then Cloudflare fetches it and
| passes it on, and also saves it in the cache for the subsequent
| requests. Removing it from the cache will just make every
| request look like it's the first one.
| rsstack wrote:
| > Mon Cheri Bridals and Maggie Sottero Designs alleged that
| Cloudflare contributes to copyright infringement by providing
| performance-improvement services, including its content-
| distribution network and caching capabilities that improve the
| quality of webpages and make them load faster, Chhabria wrote.
| But the "plaintiffs have not presented evidence from which a
| jury could conclude that Cloudflare's performance-improvement
| services materially contribute to copyright infringement. The
| plaintiffs' only evidence of the effects of these services is
| promotional material from Cloudflare's website touting the
| benefits of its services. These general statements do not speak
| to the effects of Cloudflare on the direct infringement at
| issue here."
|
| > The plaintiffs did not prove that the faster website-load
| times enabled by Cloudflare "would be likely to lead to
| significantly more infringement." Additionally, Cloudflare
| removing infringing material from its cache would not prevent
| users from seeing the copyrighted images. "[R]emoving material
| from a cache without removing it from the hosting server would
| not prevent the direct infringement from occurring," Chhabria
| wrote.
|
| The claim was that the caching of the copyright infringing
| content is an issue. Cloudflare said "that can't be the issue".
|
| You took the last sentence of the second paragraph out of its
| context.
| badrabbit wrote:
| Removal from cache means they act as a reverse proxy, it does
| not mean they take it down. But even if that was the case, who
| is to say the site isn't using their real IP as fallback in
| their DNS setup? Why does meaningful reconfiguration matter? Is
| thay effort enough to thwart hosting of infringing content? Are
| there no CDN providers outside of america?
| zozbot234 wrote:
| A site that's acting as a reverse proxy could block these
| requests altogether _in addition_ to not caching them. If the
| browser receives a 451 error ( "Unavailable for Legal
| Reasons") when requesting some offending image, there isn't a
| trivial mechanism to redirect that request to the "real
| site", at least not without forgoing Cloudflare services
| altogether.
| badrabbit wrote:
| Yes but that is exactly CF's defense, they are only
| transporting it so just like an ISP they are not liable for
| blocking it. Every ISP can also block infringing content.
| ericd wrote:
| Maybe you simply misunderstood the context and so their
| meaning? Sounds more likely than them committing perjury.
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(page generated 2021-10-07 23:00 UTC)