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Cloudflare Sued for Failing to Terminate Repeat Infringers
In a new complaint filed at a California federal court, Cloudflare stands accused of contributing to, aiding, and abetting copyright infringements. The company fails to terminate customers who are repeatedly called out and is therefore liable, the argument goes. The case in question was not filed by Hollywood or the major record labels, but by two manufacturers of wedding dresses.
[...] In 2016 Cloudflare was sued for contributory copyright infringement by adult publisher ALS Scan. This case ended in a confidential settlement this summer, but now there's more trouble on the horizon for the company.
The new threat doesn't come from any of the major entertainment industry players, but from two manufacturers and wholesalers of wedding dresses. Not a typical "piracy" lawsuit, but it's a copyright case that could have broad effects. In a complaint filed at a federal court in California, Mon Cheri Bridals and Maggie Sottero Designs argue that Cloudflare fails to terminate sites of counterfeit vendors after multiple warnings. This makes Cloudflare liable for the associated copyright infringements, they add.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday November 23 2018, @09:15PM (5 children)
https://soylentnews.org/search.pl?tid=&query=cloudflare&author=&sort=2&op=stories [soylentnews.org]
They get a bad rep here for handling of Tor, JavaScript, and funneling so many websites through a single system. But they appear to provide useful anti-DDoS protection for their customers and have a tendency towards net freedom.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Informative) by Arik on Friday November 23 2018, @11:31PM (4 children)
"Bad handling" is a monumental understatement.
They're absolutely fraudulent, when a site moves to them it is effectively removed from the web entirely; it's gone.
If the enemy of my enemy is my friend, then these plaintiff's are everyone's friend, because cloudflare is certainly humanity's enemy.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by takyon on Friday November 23 2018, @11:46PM (2 children)
If you want real freedom on the internet, you won't find it on the surface web. But Cloudflare offers convenience and reliability, and I'm pretty sure you are capable of accessing Cloudflare sites if you choose to. They aren't "gone", you are just refusing to play ball (except they now have a solution for Tor access [cloudflare.com]).
We need to build decentralized systems for communicating and sharing information.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 5, Informative) by Arik on Saturday November 24 2018, @12:19AM (1 child)
What cloudflare 'offers' me is the replacement of the webpage that I am looking for with a page which insultingly (and idiotically) suggests that I need to enable ecmascript to prove that I'm a human being.
There's no way to justify that, there's no excuse for that, it's straight up broken, and on top of being broken it *lies.* It lies in a way that is deeply wrong, this is not just promoting falsehood as 'fact' it's attacking the deep foundation of truth directly.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 24 2018, @11:20AM
The only places that remotely resemble the pre-Gamergate internet are Voat and 8chan and there are so many Nazis and morons concentrated in those places that they're hardly worth using. Try building an alternative to any mainstream site and you'll get DDOSed, flooded out by trolls, banned by your payment processor, smeared as "alt-right" in the press, etc, etc, and if you're doing it as a hobby you're likely to be fired from your real job without any explanation.
Nobody could create, say, rotten.com or newgrounds today. You can't have a liberal anti-authoritarian site that says Islam is a hate group and transgenderism is made-up bullshit. A bunch of feminists were banned by Wordpress for this this week. You can't even make Tumblr today, as Tumblr recently found out.
Everybody aggressively denies that there is any pressure from any advertiser, government, or pressure group when they ban people. Suggesting that there might be such pressure will also get you smeared as "alt-right" in the press, fired from your job, etc.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 24 2018, @01:49PM
maybe i am just a bad person with bad thoughts, but what is keeping cloudflare from hiring
professional ddos-ers to nuke your site until you submit and join the fold of cloudflares warm embrace?
just this (and the pain comeing from using tor) rubs me the wrong way.
i guess the way the internet works today, this sort of plant had to grow from it?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 23 2018, @09:21PM (3 children)
Does CloudFlair have to terminate accounts or just require the "offenders" to remove the copyrighted content? And would that even apply in this case?
IANAL, but it seems to me that CF provides services that "host" (in a sense) & distribute copies of content for their clients. The counterfeit wedding dresses may be copyrightable, but are the images of them copyrighted? Unless the CF CDN is much more advanced that I've been lead to believe, they aren't piping the wedding dresses (genuine or counterfeit) through their servers.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 23 2018, @09:37PM (1 child)
Yes, the images are (C), that is what the complaint is about -- see one of the DMCA takedown notices that is reproduced in tfa.
Not only are the counterfeiters copying the clothing, they also grab the images from the original adverts. Kind of dumb by the counterfeiters, imo.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 23 2018, @10:37PM
Thieves who are dumb and lazy? Say it ain't so ...
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday November 24 2018, @05:33AM
I friend of mine operates a data center. It's not specifically a web hosting service, rather he supplies servers and VPSes, so his customers have root on their boxes, however most of them really do serve websites.
Some of his customers were flogging counterfeit shoes from their sites. What he called "The Shoe Police" threatened to come down really hard on my friend, who only has I think for employees and who lives in a very modest way.
So he simply terminated service for all those shoe sites.
Really it can be argued that my friend did not do the right thing, that the most that The Shoe Police could legitimately do is file DMCA Notices for the _images_ of the imitation shoes, but for him to have required him to actually respond that way would result in "Our Legal Firm Can Beat Up Your Lawyer".
I don't see a solution to this problem. If you can come up with a way for those with modest incomes to defend themselves against an entire high-power legal firm I beg of you to post it.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bradley13 on Friday November 23 2018, @09:27PM (2 children)
Seriously, why is it their job. Are they actually an ISP?
Although: why is it an ISP's job anyway? Don't like what someone has online, then surely they - the people putting up the content - are who you need to talk to.
All this in direction - deplatforming - is bullshit.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by edIII on Friday November 23 2018, @10:19PM
1) It is their job because of the DMCA, which is most disagreeable, but true.
2) Cloudflare is not an ISP, or a company that brings network connections to companies. They merely provide a service that real ISPs effect by moving around packets within their networks, and to and from them.
3) Common Carrier does not apply to Cloudflare because they're not an ISP, and are in fact, a hosting service like YouTube, GoDaddy, Bluehost, etc. In some cases, it is not simple caching either.
4) This isn't deplatforming because the message isn't "political", like the bullshit spewed by such sites lamenting the treatment. That complaint is really that the big platforms with those most members won't put up with hateful rhetoric, and therefore prevent the trolls from being able to troll their preferred victims. I don't personally give a fuck if racist stormtroopers are having logistical problems online. Nobody is entitled to use social media, and I find it an instance of extreme stupidity to have given them so much power in the first place. Never any sympathy for those that complain about X site denying them the right to speak as if they were the legal equivalents of a public park. That, and the people using the DMCA are the people effecting the deplatforming, while the typical complaint is regarding activity taken directly by the company itself. Cloudflare isn't the one taking the actions against anybody, but a small business using the DMCA.
Personally, I think it's complete bullshit because the DMCA violates due process. I wouldn't respect them either, and the only thing I would ever respect is a court order and/or judgment. Yes, I do believe you are right. There should be exceptions under the law for those that provide a simple CDN service, as long as the discovery process is within the law, and the CDN cooperates and turns over user information. The DMCA and their letters are mostly used to abuse the public and prevent fair use.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 23 2018, @10:22PM
So, now do you see why regulating ISPs is important? Give them common carrier status, they are just "dumb pipes" and must be treated as such. Legalize non-discrimination for financial processors and other such basic infrastructure.
Someone wants to slander GoDaddy or whomever for having shitty people using their hosting services? GoDaddy should sue for slander with the defense that they are legally obligated to serve customers that are not violating the law. In this case the customers are breaking the law and once convicted they would lose their hosting service. Let the courts do what they're supposed to, not turn a bunch of computer techs into law enforcement.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by sjames on Friday November 23 2018, @11:03PM
All major auto makers are to be charged with hundreds of counts each of murder and assault with a deadly weapon. A coalition of prosecutors has just noticed that a car is an integral part of a crime known as a "drive-by shooting".
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday November 24 2018, @05:25AM (1 child)
Lots of it.
Whenever I find a CloudFlare-cached KiddiePr0n domain I report it to the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center [ic3.gov].
The FBI focusses most of its effort on the Dark Web - Tor so far but there is also that Java dark web, whose name I don't recall just now - but to use the .onion domain is not really necessary; there is so much CP to be found on Bing's web and image search that its sheer numbers are generally sufficient to avoid attracting the authorities' attention to any one site.
City police and county sheriff's departments generally focus on those who are creating it, so that they can prosecute the state offenses of child molestation. But I remain puzzled that neither the FBI, the King County Washington Sheriff nor the Redmond Police Department have taken any action towards Microsoft.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 24 2018, @01:45PM
i2p i think, is it still active
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 24 2018, @10:43AM (1 child)
Fashion has no copyright, like most of the bigger businesses including food, automobiles and furniture. Surely this must be something else.
I highly recommend this related interesting talk on the subject of regulation of ideas, it's also my reference for the claims of this post: https://www.ted.com/talks/johanna_blakley_lessons_from_fashion_s_free_culture [ted.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by maxwell demon on Saturday November 24 2018, @08:37PM
But photos of fashion do have copyright.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 24 2018, @11:32AM
So its not their job.