Jump to content

Court Orders Cloudflare to Terminate Accounts of Pirate Sites


Matrix

Recommended Posts

An Italian court has ordered Cloudflare to terminate the accounts of several pirate sites. The ruling comes after a complaint from local broadcaster RTI, which successfully argued that Cloudflare can be held liable if it willingly fails to act in response to copyright infringement notices.

cloudflarelogo.pngAs one of the leading CDN and DDoS protection services, Cloudflare is used by millions of websites across the globe. This includes many pirate sites.

In recent years many copyright holders have complained about Cloudflare’s involvement with these platforms. RTI, a company owned by the Italian mass media giant Mediaset, took things a step further and went to court.

RTI complained that Cloudflare offered its services to various pirate sites, which made available its TV-shows, including Grande Fratello (Big Brother), and L’isola dei Famosi (The Celebrity Island ).

The broadcaster argued that Cloudflare could be seen, among other things, as a hosting provider under the e-Commerce directive (Directive 2000/31/CE) . And, since it was made explicitly aware of the infringing actions of its clients but failed to take action, the company could be held liable.

US-based Cloudflare disagreed. It countered that the Italian court didn’t have jurisdiction and that the e-Commerce directive didn’t apply to foreign companies, but those objections were rejected.

In a ruling handed down by the Commercial Court of Rome late last month, Cloudflare was ordered to immediately terminate the accounts of the contested pirate sites. These include filmpertutti.uno, italiaserie.tv, piratestreaming.watch, cinemalibero.red, and various others.

In addition, Cloudflare was ordered to share the personal details of the site owners and their hosting companies with RTI.

If Cloudflare fails to comply with any of the above, it must pay a fine of €1,000 for each day the infringements continue.

While Cloudflare doesn’t see itself as a hosting provider, the Court concluded that it can be seen as such, under European law. Among other things, its “Always Online” service hosts various website resources even when the site’s servers go offline.

This means that unlike an ISP, which merely passes on traffic, Cloudflare can be held liable for the infringements of its customers, if it deliberately fails to respond properly to copyright takedown notices or similar complaints.

Interestingly, most of the pirate sites listed in the complaint are still online today. Some are redirecting to new domains, but Italiaserie.org is still operational using Cloudflare. We couldn’t see any RTI content on the site, however.

According to RTI’s attorney Alessandro La Rosa, Cloudflare would violate the court order if any of the mentioned sites make RTI content available through its service. This would mean that Cloudflare is liable to pay €1,000 per day.

The ruling from the Court of Rome can’t be appealed and there are also two similar proceedings against the company before the same Court. These were filed by RTI and Medusa Film (both companies of the Mediaset Group) and remain ongoing.

Cloudflare did not immediately reply to our request for comment.

The full list of affected domains as mentioned in the complaint reads as follows: filmpertutti.uno,  piratestreaming.watch, cinemalibero.red, altadefinizione.review, guardaserie.watch, serietvu.club, casacinema.news, italiaserie.org, italiaserie.tv, cinemasubito.org, and ctrlhits.online.

 

p4WORWl.gif VIEW: Original Article.
Link to comment
Share on other sites


  • Replies 3
  • Views 926
  • Created
  • Last Reply

Still don't stop me i will just use torbrowser  and get my releases on the darknet :D

 

BTDig

http://btdiggwzoyrwwbiv.onion/index.htm

 

TPB

http://uj3wazyk5u4hnvtk.onion/

 

 TGx

http://galaxy2gchufcb3z.onion/

 

Torrentz2

http://torrentzwealmisr.onion/

 

Most sites if they make much money killing there CDN want do much good there's lots of them out there just  Cloudflare is the most known  they will just start using something else like when they tried this with Libgen and  in a few days they was back going. Like RARBG  they use Oracle  instead of Cloudflare.  They is sites that don't use it. If Cloudflare has a outage you will easy be able to tell witch ones don't .:lmao:

 

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites


Cloudflare is a US-based company and they're right, they really don't have the jurisdiction to enforce this. While yes, people in Italy can access Cloudflare-protected websites, they have no recourse in regards to international law. The best they could do is block Cloudflare in their country which would probably hurt them more than help as I'm sure many legal Cloudflare protected websites are vital to the country.

 

We're talking banks, retailers, probably even some government websites. Honestly, if Cloudflare doesn't have an actual business presence in Italy, there's not much they can do.

 

Or Cloudflare could just pay the daily fine and go on with their business. €1,000 a day is really nothing for a company that size.

Link to comment
Share on other sites


51 minutes ago, lolsee2 said:

Cloudflare is a US-based company and they're right, they really don't have the jurisdiction to enforce this. While yes, people in Italy can access Cloudflare-protected websites, they have no recourse in regards to international law. The best they could do is block Cloudflare in their country which would probably hurt them more than help as I'm sure many legal Cloudflare protected websites are vital to the country.

 

We're talking banks, retailers, probably even some government websites. Honestly, if Cloudflare doesn't have an actual business presence in Italy, there's not much they can do.

 

Or Cloudflare could just pay the daily fine and go on with their business. €1,000 a day is really nothing for a company that size.

I don't know how true  that is since they have a  data center in Italy .

https://blog.cloudflare.com/tag/italy/

 

Thats how the FBI shut down Megaupload  because they used some data centers in the USA  and Megaupload was not a USA Based company , Same as KAT  same reason they used USA data centers .

 

You think this the 1st time they went after the data centers owners you sadly mistaken Leaseweb  have them allover the place and they always comply with the USA in the past.

 

Every time Cloudflare  claim  they not going to comply and they end up settling out of court and complying anyway, it just want be a matter of public record on what the terms are. It would be nice if we actually know what kind company  they was .but we don't because they closed source and are not transparent enough . I tell you one thing i don't trust them. If people knew the truth i doubt they would use them. CDNs have even ratted  out vpn users in the past . That why i dont use a vpn if they use a 3rd party CDN like Cloudflare.

Link to comment
Share on other sites


Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...