Cloudflare is actively disabling access to some pirate site URLs on its network, informing visitors that the requested pages are unavailable for legal reasons. While these types of ‘HTTP 451’ error messages are relatively rare, they are nothing more than Cloudflare complying with its legal obligations under the DMCA.
they are nothing more than Cloudflare complying with its legal obligations under the DMCA
Not really news, then, is it?
Everyone loves to hate on Cloudflare, but uh, duh, of course a US company will comply with a request under US law that they have to comply with?
If you don’t want your shit DMCAed, don’t use anything based in the US to provide it.
Go host somewhere that doesn’t have smiliar laws and won’t comply with foreign requests.
It’s important news for pirates, because if you’ve set cloudflare dns resolvers in your *arr stack then certain things might stop working (e.g. blocked indexers). I just switched my system to another DNS service because of this.
I switched to Quad9 since I like how they fought and finally won on appeal the Sony lawsuit (see https://torrentfreak.com/dns-resolver-quad9-wins-pirate-site-blocking-appeal-against-sony-231208/)
Cloudfare is cancer
So much for net neutrality.
It was my understanding that “net neutrality” revolved mainly around ISPs and their “common carrier” status. Specifically not being able to create “fast lanes” or other shaping and pricing decisions around content. This would also give them some shielding around content by ensuring they treated all information “equally”.
Based on that, I’m curious how your statement applies given that CloudFlare is not an ISP, but rather a paid for service that is not required to access the internet.
That is correct, I made a not very precise comment. However, Cloudflare is the defacto CDN of the internet and therefore they should be considered an ISP with monopoly status. Therefore some neutrality regulation should apply (although I realize that nobody will make regulation to keep illegal content online, which is understandable). And this decision should not be made by assumed copyright holders via DMCA, but by some type of jurisdiction.
